Support for referenced projects

[phmonte]

Support for referenced projects

[josephwoodward]

Is this not because you're loading a single project? (var analyzer = manager.GetProject(initialPath);) @daveaglick can hopefully shed some more light on this, I've always assumed it'll only load a single project that way but I could be wrong.

What if you were to pass the solution directory when constructing your AnalyzerManager?

[daveaglick]

Yep, @josephwoodward is correct - Buildalyzer doesn't know about solutions (yet). It'll automatically wire up referenced projects when you use the workspaces extension like this:

AnalyzerManager manager = new AnalyzerManager();
ProjectAnalyzer analyzer1 = manager.GetProject(@"C:\MyCode\MyProject.csproj");
ProjectAnalyzer analyzer2 = manager.GetProject(@"C:\MyOtherCode\MyOtherProject.csproj");
AdhocWorkspace workspace = new AdhocWorkspace();
analyzer1.AddToWorkspace(workspace);
analyzer2.AddToWorkspace(workspace);

In that case, your workspace.CurrentSolution will have projects for both MyProject.csproj and MyOtherProject.csproj and they'll have the correct project references within the Roslyn workspace for each other (but not for any projects that haven't already been loaded by the manager!).

TL;DR: You've got to load each project into the AnalyzerManager and add them each to the Roslyn workspace. There's also an extension you can use on the manager: AdhocWorkspace workspace = manager.GetWorkspace() that'll load all the projects you've created from the manager into the Roslyn workspace but you've still got to create the projects from the manager first.

I eventually plan to support parsing and loading whole solutions, just haven't gotten there yet.

[josephwoodward]

Question for you @daveaglick,

If my Project A references ProjectB and ProjectC, would loading ProjectA via manager.GetProject(); also implicitly load ProjectB and C, or would I also need to do that?

[daveaglick]

@josephwoodward Not right now, no. It would only load ProjectA. In fact, the main Buildalyzer library doesn't do anything at all with project references. It's only the Buildalyzer.Workspaces extension that even considers them (and even then, only to wire them up if you manually add them to the workspace).

I've got a couple thoughts here:

• Add an optional bool property named something like LoadProjectReferences to AnalyzerManager that automatically loads referenced projects into the manager when a ProjectAnalyzer goes past the Load() stage.
• Add a similar argument to the extension methods in the Workspaces extension to do the same - load referenced projects into the manager and then also populate then in the workspace.
• Add support for loading entire solutions in the AnalyzerManager.

[josephwoodward]

Sounds like a good idea, happy to take this one on at some point.

[kentcb]

Buildalyzer doesn't know about solutions

Ah, bummer. Yeah, loading the solution itself was actually the first thing I tried since that's how my existing Roslyn-only code was working.

I will close this issue then, and open another to track solution loading, since that is seemingly what I'll need to progress. My tool can't really know about all projects to load in advance, since it is intended to work against any solution.

[daveaglick]

👍

Please do open a feature request issue for loading solution files - hope to get that in pretty soon (feel free to grab it @josephwoodward if you need another PR for Hacktoberfest 😄)