How do you build Xalan-C with Visual Studio 2010?

Question

I can not find proof that it's possible. After 40 hours of driving myself to insanity, I'm left with a situation where I cannot build the Localization project that supposedly builds a header file needed by the poorly named AllInOne project (which builds Xalan-C.lib, natch).

This library is software malpractice writ-large, I am desperate for an answer because it is a dependency in another library that I have no alternative to using.

Answer 1

I have managed to build Xalan-C version 1.11, compatible with the latest version of Xerces-C (v3.1.1), in Visual Studio 2010. I don't know if it is possible with earlier versions, however these are the steps I followed in order to build with version 1.11:

• Xerces-C has to be built as a dynamic library to obtain the xerces-c_3_1D.dll file which MsgCreator.exe is dependent on.

• Clone the github repository to obtain the source code of Xalan-C version 1.11.

• Set the environment variables XERCESCROOT and XALANCROOT in windows (not in Visual Studio).

   XERCESCROOT    The Xerces-C/C++ installation directory
   XALANCROOT     The Xalan-C/C++ source directory
  

• Open the Xalan-C solution in VS2010 and build the MsgCreator project.

• Copy the xerces-c_3_1D.dll file from the Xerces-C build and place it in the Xalan-C build folder, the same folder where MsgCreator.exe is located.

Now it is possible to generate the "missing" header files (LocalMsgIndex.hpp and LocalMsgData.hpp) that are needed to build the "AllInOne" project.

• Run MsgCreator.exe in cmd with the provided path to XalanMsg_en_US.xlf which is located in $(XALANCROOT)\src\xalanc\NLS\en_US and what method to use when building the locale messages.

  MsgCreator.exe $(XALANCROOT)\src\xalanc\NLS\en_US\XalanMsg_en_US.xlf -TYPE=inmem
  

(I used -TYPE=inmem, but check to see what method is best suited for your solution)

• The header files are now generated and located in the build directory (where MsgCreator.exe resides). Copy or move them to $(XALANCROOT)\src and they should now be able to be located.

• Now build the XalanMsgLib project.

• And the last thing to do before the final build is to handle the including of afxres.h in the AllInOne.rc file (located in $(XALANCROOT)\Projects\Win32\Res\AllInOne). Visual Studio Express edition does not contain the MFC library which contains the afxres.h header. I simply changed it to #include "windows.h" instead.

And now it should be possible to build "AllInOne" successfully.

Answer 2

I struggled with this also and this is my recipe (VS2015 but look up the cmake docs for other IDEs)

Note I was specifically targeting xerces 3.2.3 and xalan 1.12. Use git tag to get the versions you need

git clone https://github.com/apache/xerces-c.git
cd xerces-c
git checkout v3.2.3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -BVS2015 -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" -A x64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cd VS2015
devenv xerces-c.sln /Build Debug /Project ALL_BUILD

Because I use this with another build process that expects things in a certain way: (assume you set up a target dir env called XERCESBUILD with bin/lib child dirs)

copy src\Debug\*.dll %XERCESBUILD%\bin
copy src\Debug\*.lib %XERCESBUILD%\lib

Then for xalan

git clone https://github.com/apache/xalan-c
cd xalan-c
git checkout Xalan-C_1_12_0
mkdir build
cd build
set PATH=%PATH%;%XERCESBUILD%\bin
cmake .. -BVS2015 -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" -A x64 -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%JBCRELEASEDIR% -DXALAN_DEBUG=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DXerce
sC_LIBRARY_DEBUG=%XERCESBUILD%\lib\xerces-c_3D.lib
cd VS2015
devenv xalan-c.sln /Build Debug /Project ALL_BUILD

Note the xerces-c_3D.lib is specifically the Debug build so remove the D when doing the Release build.