I had the requirement of creating a MSBuild custom task that opens a .csproj
adds a reference to another project.
The problem I faced is that references in VisualStudio are generated as relative paths,
so I needed something to help me generate relative paths.
After some Googleing I finally found this code. It was in a long forum discussion
and was posted by a guy named something like Marcin Grzabski. And here it is for posterity.
private static string EvaluateRelativePath(string mainDirPath, string absoluteFilePath)
{ string[]
firstPathParts =
mainDirPath.Trim(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar).Split(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar);
string[]
secondPathParts =
absoluteFilePath.Trim(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar).Split(Path.DirectorySeparatorChar);
int sameCounter = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < Math.Min(firstPathParts.Length,secondPathParts.Length); i++)
{ if (
!firstPathParts[i].ToLower().Equals(secondPathParts[i].ToLower()))
{ break;
}
sameCounter++;
}
if (sameCounter == 0)
{ return absoluteFilePath;
}
string newPath = String.Empty;
for (int i = sameCounter; i < firstPathParts.Length; i++)
{ if (i > sameCounter)
{ newPath += Path.DirectorySeparatorChar;
}
newPath += "..";
}
if (newPath.Length == 0)
{ newPath = ".";
}
for (int i = sameCounter; i < secondPathParts.Length; i++)
{ newPath += Path.DirectorySeparatorChar;
newPath += secondPathParts[i];
}
return newPath;
}
And to use is just do somelines like:
String test = EvaluateRelativePath(@"E:\Source_Code\Code\ProjectsGroup1\Project1", @"E:\Source_Code\Code\ProjecstGroup2\Project2");
//This will genearate something like ..\..\ProjectGroup2\Project2