ogees / mt4-expander Goto Github PK

This project is part of the MetaTrader 4 development framework.

For backward compatibility with Windows XP the DDL is built with Visual Studio 2008 (an Express version was not tested). It may be possible to setup a current version of Visual Studio to support Windows XP (or to skip Windows XP support at all).

The header files in {expander-root}/header/shared should be shared with the MetaTrader 4 MQL framework to make sure that definitions in both projects match. It can be accomplished by symlinking the files from {rosasurfer/mt4-mql}/mql4/include/shared to {expander-root}/header/shared. The DLL can be build with and without shared headers. If you get the error Cannot open include file: 'shared/defines.h': No such file or directory symlink the shared files or run the build tool at least once to setup building without shared headers.

If the Visual Studio build tool can't find the header files in {expander-root}/header/shared the pre-build event restores backups from {expander-root}/header/shared/bak.

After a successfull build the post-build event creates new backups of the currently used files. If a (symlinked) directory {expander-root}/bin/mql4-libraries is found the resulting DLL is copied into that directory.

:: Pre-build event
if not exist "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\defines.h" (
   echo Shared header "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\defines.h" missing, using backup...
   copy "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\bak\defines.h" "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\"
)
if not exist "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\errors.h" (
   echo Shared header "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\errors.h" missing, using backup...
   copy "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\bak\errors.h" "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\"
)

:: Post-build event
echo Backing up shared header files...
copy "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\*.h" "$(ProjectDir)header\shared\bak\"

if exist "$(ProjectDir)bin\mql4-libraries\" (
    echo Copying DLL to MetaTrader MQL library folder...
    copy "$(TargetPath)" "$(ProjectDir)bin\mql4-libraries\rsfExpander.$(ConfigurationName)$(TargetExt)"
)

A comfortable way to manage Windows reparse points is the free Link Shell Extension by Hermann Schinagl. To activate Git support for symbolic links on Windows add the config option core.symlinks = true to your Git configuration:

$ git config --global core.symlinks true