DEFINES in QT Creator

UHaider

Hi,

I am trying to pass value of a DEFINES from Qt creator to source code. I am passing following line in Qt Creator

DEFINES+=MY_DIR=\"username\"
Click on link Image.

But when I use following line of code

qDebug () << MY_DIR;

I get

error: C2065: 'username': undeclared identifier.

I also tried

DEFINES+='MY_DIR "username"' but it gives some other error. If I set the value to an integer it works fine like DEFINES+=MY_DIR=541. But setting the value to string is not working :(

What is wrong here?

SGaist

Hi,

IIRC, the windows shell needs something a bit more complex to handle quoted string.

However, are you sure that MY_DIR should be a define ? From what you wrote it seems it should rather be something that you can change at run time, no ?

UHaider

@SGaist Thanks for your time. No, not at run time. I only need to set while building\installing the application. It is not working on Linux either :(

SGaist

Can you give more details about what you do with that define in your application ?

UHaider

@SGaist the define contains the path to a folder. In my Qt application I am using the define to read files in that folder and display the text of the files read. I want this to be a define so that user can pass this as an argument to qmake while building\installing the application.

SGaist

Well, that sounds rather like something that your user should either configure as command line parameter or read from a configuration file. Otherwise if he wants to change that folder for whatever reason he may had, he won't need to re-build/re-install the application.

UHaider

Yes you are right but user cannot change the location of the folder once application is installed so a define can be used in this scenario. But I am unable to do it. Can you please give any example for doing it?

SGaist

Why can't he change that ?

Try with:

MY_DIR_STR = '\\"$${ZE_DIR}\\"'                                   
DEFINES += MY_DIR=\"$${MY_DIR_STR}\"

message($$DEFINES)

Call qmake like that

qmake ZE_DIR=whatever

mrjj

Hi
I did
DEFINES+=PROJECT_LOCATION="$$shell_path($$PRO_FILE_PWD)"
in my profile to know where project is.

To use it as a string i had to do the following

#define _STR(x) #x
#define STR(x) _STR(x)

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
const char* ProjLocation = STR(PROJECT_LOCATION);

without the stringify macro (STR) it would see the actual path and give compile errors.

UHaider

@SGaist Thanks for your reply. It is working :)
It is a kind of restriction on user I know it is not good practice.