[question] Conan 2.x Migration - MSBuild project properties

[radonish]

What is your question?

Hello,
I'm working on migrating an MSBuild project to Conan 2.x that passed a "Platforms" property in Conan 1.x by doing something like:

def build(self):
    msbuild = MSBuild(self)
    build_properties = {"Platform":"Mixed Platforms"}
    msbuild.build("project.sln", parallel=False, use_env=False, properties=build_properties)

That affected the build configuration and the build would output:
Building solution configuration "Release|Mixed Platforms".

For Conan 2.x it looked like the equivalent would be to do the following:

def generate(self):
        tc = MSBuildToolchain(self)
        tc.properties["Platform"] = "Mixed Platforms"
        tc.generate()

        # If there are requirements
        deps = MSBuildDeps(self)
        deps.generate()

def build(self):
    msbuild = MSBuild(self)
    msbuild.build(sln=os.path.join(self.export_sources_folder, "project.sln"))

However, the build configuration is not as desired ("Release|Mixed Platforms") based on the output:
Building solution configuration "Release|x86".

Is there something I'm missing in my approach to get the "Platform" property down to MSBuild properly?

Thank you!

Have you read the CONTRIBUTING guide?

• I've read the CONTRIBUTING guide

[memsharded]

Hi @radonish

Thanks for your question.

tc.properties["Platform"] = "Mixed Platforms"

The properties is only for generic key=value properties in the generate .props file, but not for changing the core platform.

The MSBuild helper has the .platform to define the desired command line argument:

cmd = 'msbuild "%s" /p:Configuration="%s" /p:Platform=%s' % (sln, self.build_type, self.platform)

# so 
build = MSBuild(self)
build.platform= "potato"
# will generate
msbuild ... /p:Platform=potato

If that is what you want.

A different thing is if using the conan_toolchain.props, because at the moment the conditions generated are:

    def _name_condition(self, settings):
        props = [("Configuration", self.configuration),
                 # TODO: refactor, put in common with MSBuildDeps. Beware this is != msbuild_arch
                 #  because of Win32
                 ("Platform", {'x86': 'Win32',
                               'x86_64': 'x64',
                               'armv7': 'ARM',
                               'armv8': 'ARM64'}.get(settings.get_safe("arch")))]

        name = "".join("_%s" % v for _, v in props if v is not None)
        condition = " And ".join("'$(%s)' == '%s'" % (k, v) for k, v in props if v is not None)
        return name.lower(), condition

It looks this might need some further parametrization. Can you please confirm that your Mixed Platforms is kind of "architecture" type selector? How it does connect to the underlying Conan settings.arch? Because that arch will have one of those values, isn't it? It could be a bit confusing to have a package with a package_id for arch=armv8, but the binaries that were built do not match that because they were "Mixed Platforms".
So the Platform seems limited to the architecture.