Visual Studio Post Build Event - Copy to Relative Directory Location

Question

On a successful build  I wish to copy the contents of the output directory to a different location under the same  base  folder  This parent folder is a relative part and can vary based on Source Control settings   I have listed a few of the Macro values available to me         SolutionDir    D  GlobalDir Version AppName Solution1 build    ProjectDir     D  GlobalDir Version AppName Solution1 Version ProjectA   I want to copy the Output Dir contents to the following folder    D  GlobalDir Version AppName Solution2 Project Dependency  The base location  D  GlobalDir Version AppName  needs to be fetched from one of the above macros  However  none of the macro values list only the parent location   How do I extract only the base location for the post build copy command

User · Accepted Answer

If none of the TargetDir or other macros point to the right place, use the ".." directory to go backwards up the folder hierarchy.

ie. Use $(SolutionDir)\..\.. to get your base directory.

For list of all macros, see here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/c02as0cs.aspx

User · Answer

I think this is related  but I had a problem when building directly using msbuild command line  from a batch file  vs building from within VS   Using something like the following    lt PostBuildEvent gt    MOVE  Y    TargetDir something file1     ProjectDir something file1    start XCOPY  Y  R    SolutionDir SomeConsoleApp bin   ConfigurationName        ProjectDir App Data Consoles SomeConsoleApp    lt  PostBuildEvent gt     note  start XCOPY rather than XCOPY used to get around a permissions issue which prevented copying   The macro   SolutionDir  evaluated to     when executing msbuild from a batchfile  which resulted in the XCOPY command failing   It otherwise worked fine when built from within Visual Studio   Confirmed using  verbosity diagnostic to see the evaluated output   Using the macro   ProjectDir     instead  which amounts to the same thing  worked fine and retained the full path in both build scenarios

User · Answer

Here is what you want to put in the project s Post-build event command line   copy  Y    TargetDir   ProjectName  dll     SolutionDir lib   ProjectName  dll    EDIT  Or if your target name is different than the Project Name   copy  Y    TargetDir   TargetName  dll     SolutionDir lib   TargetName  dll

User · Answer

You could try     SolutionDir

User · Answer

Would it not make sense to use msbuild directly   If you are doing this with every build  then you can add a msbuild task at the end   If you would just like to see if you can   t find another macro value that is not showed on the Visual Studio IDE  you could switch on the msbuild options to diagnostic and that will show you all of the variables that you could use  as well as their current value   To switch this on in visual studio  go to Tools Options then scroll down the tree view to the section called Projects and Solutions  expand that and click on Build and Run  at the right their is a drop down that specify the build output verbosity  setting that to diagnostic  will show you what other macro values you could use   Because I don   t quite know to what level you would like to go  and how complex you want your build to be  this might give you some idea   I have recently been doing build scripts  that even execute SQL code as part of the build   If you would like some more help or even some sample build scripts  let me know  but if it is just a small process you want to run at the end of the build  the perhaps going the full msbuild script is a bit of over kill   Hope it helps Rihan

[visual-studio] Visual Studio Post Build Event - Copy to Relative Directory Location

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