[cdt-dev] adding a toolchain with common options to tools

[Ashutosh <ashutoshpal2006@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

 

I am adding a toolchain to CDT using the buildDefinitions extension point of the Managed Builder. My toolchain has a few common options that need to be passed to all the downstream tools (i.e. compiler, linker, archiver etc), for example:

 

mycc   --model <MODEL_NAME>

mylink --model <MODEL_NAME>

myar --model <MODEL_NAME>

 

So, here ‘—model’ is such an option. I want to take the input of this option only at a single place in the UI. To achieve this, I added one option (with id my.toolchain.general.model) at the tool-chain level and a corresponding “invisible” option (with id my.toolchain.compiler.model) at the tool level, as you can see in the snippet of the plugin.xml:

      <toolChain

            id="my.toolchain.toolchain"

            isAbstract="true"

            name="my tool chain"

            osList="linux"

            targetTool="my.toolchain.linker">

         <option

               category="my.toolchain.general_options"

               id="my.toolchain.general.model"

               isAbstract="false"

               name="Model Name"

               resourceFilter="all"

               valueHandler="my.build.toolchain.HierarchicalOptionsValueHandler"

               valueType="string">

         </option>

      </toolChain>

      <tool

            command="mycc -c"

           id="my.toolchain.compiler"

            isAbstract="true"

            name="My Compiler"

            natureFilter="both"

            outputFlag="-o">     

         <option

               category="my.toolchain.compiler.compiler_options"

               command="--model"

               commandGenerator="my.build.toolchain.HierarchicalOptionsCommandGenerator"

               id="my.toolchain.compiler.model"

               isAbstract="false"

               name="Model Name"

               resourceFilter="all"

               valueType="string">

            <enablement

                  type="CMD_USAGE">

            </enablement>

            <enablement

                  type="UI_VISIBILITY">

               <false>

                  false body text

               </false>

            </enablement>

         </option>

      </tool>

 

 

The idea here was to take the input from UI using the toolchain-level option, while use the invisible option during the generation of the command. For this, I needed to copy the input value from UI to the invisible option's value. I achieved this by attaching OptionsValueHandler to the toolchain-level option (as can be seen in plugin.xml also) and in there I implemented the copying. With this, things started working if I always open the "Build Settings" dialog before issuing the build, but in other cases, the option value was not available in the command. I tried fixing this using the commandGenerator hook in the invisible option, but then saw some other issues.

Could someone please suggest/comment that the approach I have taken is in the right direction or if there are other better/simpler approaches to tackle such options that need to passed to a number of tools in CDT Managed build mechanism?

 

Thanks and Regards,

Ashutosh