Really would like pre-build step implementation

[jafeucht]

For years, our company has been using VisualGDB, but it has one flaw which makes many things difficult for us. It does not have a way of adding a pre-build step. Most environments provide a way of doing this. We see that with the Custom or Ultimate editions, Custom Build steps are provided, however reading about them, they are a lot more powerful than we really need.

It does appear in the Visual Studio settings, there are already custom steps for post-compile (after generation of every object file, so this is not what we want) and post-link (after everything has already been compiled, so at this point it’s too late). We need a feature like these, but they occur pre-build.

What we really need is some way of running a single command line to run software which pretty much embeds the current SVN revision number and saves it into an *.h file. That way, the software knows what the current SVN revision number is for every new version we produce (for traceability purposes).

Has anybody figured out a work-around for this? I’m using 5.5R5 build 4124. We are compiling using MSBuild for STM32F405RG.

[support]

Hi,

You can always achieve this by creating custom MSBuild targets via editing the .vcxproj file. It is much less straight-forward than the custom steps provided by the VisualGDB Custom Edition, but will work just fine once you get familiar with the MSBuild internals.

[jafeucht]

I spent some time figuring this out. I found that what worked for me was adding the following anywhere in the *.vcxproj file under the main Project XML section:

<Target Name="BeforeBuild" BeforeTargets="PrepareForBuild">
  <Exec Command="<<Exe call with command line>>" />
</Target>

What’s important with the Exec command is that all XML unsafe characters are escaped (< becomes “&gt;”, ” becomes “&quot;”, & becomes “&amp;”, etc.)

[Author]

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