[Cmake] How to do configuration specific options in the MS Visual Studio Projects

[Brad King]

Aleksey Sanin wrote:
> Hi, All!
> 
> Probably the question is trivial but I can find answer in cmake docs or 
> in google and
> my experiments show no positive signs. Thus I got to a point when I need 
> help.
> 
> I have a CMake based makefiles system that generates MS VS .NET project 
> files.
> There is an external library ABC that has two flavors: debug and 
> release. Obviously,
> I want to link my debug builds with debug version of ABC and link my 
> release builds
> with release version of ABC. The problem is that both debug and release 
> versions
> of ABC have *the same* name "libabc.lib". Thus I want to place these 
> versions into
> two different folders, say "external/debug" and "external/release". Now 
> I need to tell
> CMake to generate *different* library search paths for "Debug" and 
> "Release" configurations
> in MS Visual Studio and I can't find a way to do this.
> 
> I have found the "debug" and "optimized" flags for LINK_LIBRARIES 
> directive. But
> this does not work if the library has the same name. By some internal 
> reasons, the option
> of renaming the library ABC is not a solution. Also I know that I can 
> have different debug and
> release names for my target and use SET_TARGET_PROPERTIES command to set
> different LINK_FLAGS but this is also not acceptable to me. Also 
> creating two project
> files is not a good idea too.
> 
> I would appreciate any hints for the solution.

There is no explicit support for something like this in the current 
Visual Studio generators.  You can try something like this (untested):

IF(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Visual Studio")
   TARGET_LINK_LIBRARIES(mytarget /path/to/$(IntDir)/libabc.lib)
ELSE(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Visual Studio")
   # Do something else to link the library.
ENDIF(CMAKE_GENERATOR MATCHES "Visual Studio")

The "$(IntDir)" should be parens, not curlys.  It will be passed by 
CMake through to the generated project file and Visual Studio will 
evaluate "$(IntDir)" to "Debug" or "Release" at build time.

-Brad