[question] How to pass resource file path to consumer? about conan HOT 3 CLOSED

Hi @s-mlr

Thanks for your question.

Have you considered using the cppinfo.resdirs definition? (https://docs.conan.io/2/reference/conanfile/methods/package_info.html). This would be intended for directories containing resource files for consumers.

Then, the only issue is that there is no standard way to use these files in the consumers. CMakeToolchain will have the <pkgname>_RES_DIRS_<config> variables defines, you might want to directly use these variables in your consumer CMakeLists.txt after the find_package?

If not, it is possible to directly access from the consumers:

# in the consumer conanfile.py
def generate(self):
     res_folder = self.dependencies["mydep"].cpp_info.resdirs
     # do whatever operation you need to do with the ``res_folder`` or the files inside it

Note this doesn't really hardcode the path to the files in the dependency, the resdirs is an abstraction/parameterization, and can be used to change it in the dependency without altering the consumer.

Please let me know if this helps.

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Thanks @memsharded for your immediate reply. Your response times are second to none!

That approach certainly works and I'm completely fine with. I mainly wanted to make sure there is no other design available to completely take care of this from the consumer side. As long as I'm following best practices it's all good.

It does feel like it would be aligned with the general idea / behavior of current generators (as I read them) to fully define it from consumer side and the tc basically already added that option, so I'm keen to see if something along those lines might be coming in the future?

Please consider the question answered. Thanks a bunch!

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It does feel like it would be aligned with the general idea / behavior of current generators (as I read them) to fully define it from consumer side and the tc basically already added that option, so I'm keen to see if something along those lines might be coming in the future?

The challenge here is that we haven't seen any common pattern or usage of resource files, that are wildly varying in nature and usage. For a built-in generator it would be necessary to have some well known and popular usage patterns to implement anything in Conan. As always, we are open to feedback to learn about the use cases, but so far seems a bit unlikely.

Thanks to you for the feedback!

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