CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2010xamarin.android
Olivertech
Olivertech

Reputation: 587

Mono fo Android - One Solution for many clients

I have created three different solutions for three different clients, but those solutions are for an app that have the same features, classes, methods, resolution, except for the images, XML resource files, and a web service reference, that are specific for each one.

I would like to have just one solution for all those apps, that I could open in VS2010 IDE for edition, without errors. So, when I need to build or publish an specific app, I just set the client which one I need to, and go ahead to building or publishing.

It is important to consider that XML file names will be the same, as classes and images names too. The difference will be the content, but the name will always be the same.

My intention is to reduce my effort to maintain many solutions, having just one solution to work with.

In my company, we will have more than those three clients soon, so I am worried about how to maintain that. The best way will be have just one solution and when I need to generate a new app for a new client, I have just to change/include a few things (like some resources and images) and compile to a new client folder.

Is it possible? If so how?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 141

Answers (2)

Stuart
Stuart

Reputation: 66882

There are many ways you could look to tackle this.

My favorite would be to run some sort of pre-build step - probably outside of Visual Studio - which simply replaces the files with the correct ones before you do a build. This would be easy to automate and easy to scale.

If you are going to be building for many more than three customers, then I think you should look to switch from Visual Studio building to some other automated build system - e.g. MSBuild from the command line or from something like TeamCity or CruiseControl. You'll find it much easier to scale if your build is automated (and robust)

If you don't like the file idea, then there are plenty of other things you could try:

  • You could try doing a similar step to above, but could do it inside VS using a pre-Build step.
  • You could use Conditional nodes within the .csproj file to switch files via a project configuration
  • You could look to shift the client-specific resources into another assembly - and then use GetResourceStream (or similar) at runtime to extract the resources.

But none of these feel as nice to me!

Upvotes: 0

Mike Stonis
Mike Stonis

Reputation: 2188

One option would be to have a master solution which had the following

  • A "Template" project that contained your actual application and all of the shared code
  • Projects for all of your clients

In the projects for your clients, you could have links to the files in your files that come from your shared project. Then, in each of those projects, you could add the files that are only specific to them.

With this kind of structure, whenever you made a change to your Template project, all of the client projects would be updated as well because they just have pointers back to the Template project.

A good reference for this kind of setup would be the Json.Net Code Base. There he has a solution and project for all of the different configurations, but they all share the same files.

In terms of ensuring that the xml files are named properly, you might just want to put some checks into your main application to ensure that it has all of the files needed or potentially add a check into your build process.

Upvotes: 1

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