When I create a new project from existing sources in Idea, it just creates multiple modules with names like main1, main2 etc and splits main and test folders in maven-like project structure.
Could I still create an Idea project with nice module names and structure?
Yes, you can rearrange classes by dragging and dropping, or just changing the package statements.
Having a maven like project structure is advised as this convention is relied on by many frameworks i.e Junit.
I want that a maven project can be used as a black box jar. This is needed because second project was born its way, and I don't want to integrate its code by hand. So the best way is that this project is going to save it's data on db, but it should use a service offered by the "wrapper" project to save them.
The idea is simple, the secondary project can expose just a method to which I will pass the service that offers the save method as a parameter.
The secondary project should not have configuration files, but should rely on the father application's properties.
Any idea to do this fast and almsot good? Thanks for any suggestion.
EDIT 2013/03/07: The idea behind this is that the second project should generate a classic jar library that looks a properties file into the classpath of the host project. Something like Quartz/Spring/... you import jar and you provide the properties file.
I just defined some classes to load properties from the classpath, and some interfaces to make the two projects interact.
In pom.xml of the parent project I imported the child project excluding it's dependencies to avoid conflicts.
It was a pretty easy task at the end.
There have been many posts on this topic, but I have yet to find the "real" solution.
How does one manage their dependency tree (both compile time and runtime) using MSBuild project files (i.e. Visual Studio project files via project and file references)?
It is well known that project references from child projects will not be copied to an application bin directory if there is no compile time reference, even if there is a runtime dependency, and even if copy-local=true. Hence, any loosely coupled component will not be copied over.
The hack to solve this problem is to include the dependency in the parent project with copy-local=true. However, this basically destroys your dependency tree as you no longer know where the dependency is and ultimately, as your app grows and morphs, you end up with a version of DLL hell. Your parent project ends up with 10s to 100s of dlls, most of which are runtime dependencies of dlls in child projects.
Another hack is to write a custom targets file and call it from every project file: http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2009/09/making-msbuild-visual-studio-to.html. But surely there is a better option. This is such a bread and butter thing. Java devs never have to deal with such trivial issues.
From what I can gather, the Microsoft way to solve this problem is to register every dependency in the GAC for every dev, test and production machine. But this is stupid and annoying. I won't bother giving this option and educated rebuttal.
Avoiding the GAC option, how could one use MSBuild to manage a dependency tree that includes runtime only dependencies? How does Microsoft do it? Surely they don't run custom targets files like the one in the link above.
I hope someone from an enterprise .NET background can step up and offer some real advice on this. Otherwise I'm just going to have to rewrite all my build scripts in NAnt (shudder).
Thanks All.
UPDATE
In response to some comments, the following is a practical example of the issue from my current project.
The app is a Web Application project that exposes a suite of WCF services. It has an external domain DLL containing the external service classes and an internal domain DLL containing internal service POCOs, domain objects and DAOs. There is a separate integration DLL containing interfaces (DTOs) for all the internal domain classes that allows us to completely decouple the external and internal domains. The whole thing is wired up with Spring.net. I hope this is clear, let me know if you need more clarification.
My current build process is to use MSBuild to generate a deployment package for the web application (in TFS Build). So while the whole solution is built initially, only the output from the web application gets packaged. Therefore, the Web Application is treated as the dependency root and I expect that any loosely coupled child references should get copied over on build if they are set to 'copy-always=true'.
So the Web Application contains a reference to the external domain DLL which contains a reference to the internal domain DLL which contains many references to 3rd party libraries and various indirect and loosely coupled dependencies required by the 3rd party libraries.
The problem occurs when there is a 3rd party dependency in the internal domain DLL e.g. oracle.dataaccess which is required by NHibernate at runtime. Even when I set 'copy-always=true' on these DLLs, they do not get copied to the Web App package. The only way I can include them in the package is to add these DLLs to the Web App's references. I don't want to do this because I no longer have a meaningful dependency tree.
I hope this makes the issue clearer. Please let me know if anything is unclear. It's hard to describe this sort of stuff.
If anyone is also having a similar issue, please speak up and share your experience.
I really want to give you a better answer but unfortunately you didn't put enough information about your solution/projects and your dependencies, so I will try to give you several ideas and I hope one of them works.
The easiest thing to do as you said is to set up a separate folder with all of your dependencies and create target file that will copy them to your bin folder. If you have dependencies that are not changing frequently that might work. If another team from your company is building them and they change frequently, this approach is not good.
Another simple approach - if you're referencing your dependencies from your solution only you can change the build path, so that they build directly into the bin folder of your main project. This way you don't have to reference them directly.
Use NuGet. You have a separate team producing loosely coupled dependencies it may make a sense to set up local NuGet repository and use it for that http://juristr.com/blog/2012/04/using-nuget-to-distribute-our-company/
I hope that helps.
I created 2 dummy projects in my application and named them BAL and DAL. When I build them, they build successfully. If I add a reference to BAL to the DAL project, it added nicely. But while adding the DAL reference to the BAL project, I get the following error:
A reference to DAL could not be added. Adding this project as a reference would cause a circular dependency.
Can anyone help me to solve this error?
Here's what you need to do:
Right click on the DAL Project in the solution explorer and select Project dependencies in the context menu.
You will now see a window that shows the project dependencies of the DAL Project. Make sure that BAL isn't checked.
Now you should be able to add your reference...
I hope this helps I've tried to keep it as simple and straight forward as possible.
Explanation:
Your DAL should not be able to access the BAL. Your code reference dependencies should be like this:
MVC project -> BAL -> DAL
The MVC project should reference the BAL, the BAL should reference the DAL. Set up your project like this. Make it work and then you will better understand why this setup is better.
Given:
Data = raw numbers and strings
Information = processed data into something meaningful
Cosider the following:
The UI should get its information from the BAL which could be able to compose it's data based on the DAL.
You can only reference in one way otherwise you get the error like you said. Just do this: delete the reference from your DAL to your BL and make a new one from your BL to your DAL!
It is implicit in the concept of "layers" that higher layers depend on lower ones, and not the other way round. If 2 "layers" are mutually dependent, then one is not higher than the other, they are not layers in any meaningful sense, and so can be considered to be in the same layer. The same basic principle holds for architectural components or modules, as enforced by Studio for project dependencies. If you use this principle - think of your projects as design modules rather than e.g. just throwing everything into a single project - you will have well-structured codebase which will give you far less problems as it grows in size.
That would cause a circular dependency. What you perhaps want to do instead is have a main application project, which references the BAL, and then BAL referenes DAL.
Data access should not need to reference business logic.
This just happened to me. You have a circular dependency, i.e. two projects both referencing each other. You need to make one of them independent of the other. Takes some time and it happens so quick. One second I was happily coding along, and the next I had 45 errors like this. Just took some time but it makes your architecture/program structure better too, helping you sort out dependencies properly.
Occasionally, you have two different projects, each of which needs methods that the other has. In this case, you can either make a third project and move the shared code into there, or choose one of the two projects to put the shared code in.
This problem occurred to me when I was building a WPF application with several layers like repository interface layer, repository service layer, sql service layer, rest service layer and my main WPF UI layer.
I resolved this error. I noticed that some of the layers were
unnecessarily referencing other projects. I removed this unnecessary
reference.
Then I noticed that some of my service layer and repository layer
had my WPF UI project as reference(My StartUp project); this is
what was creating circular reference. I removed this.
========================================================================
Conclusion: Check each projects reference dependency and make sure there are no unnecessary reference. Make sure sub layers are not referencing the startup project in the reference.
Hope I was helpful.
In my case I copied a project file without generating a new ProjectGuid. Since Visual Studio uniquely identifies projects using the ProjectGuid, it assumed the project was trying to reference itself.
in my case the project was somehow already declared in refrences in csproj.cs in the targeted project so simply i removed all the dependency in csproj.cs and tried to add from main project again and it worked
I had two projects called Application and Persistance that the reference of the Application project to the Persistance project encountered a circular dependency error.
By clicking on the Application project and looking at the values used inside it, you will notice that the Persistance project is include inside the <ItemGroup> tag, which is why you receive a Circular Dependency error.
To fix this error, just Comment this Include.
To get around this, add the reference by browsing to the projects DLL after it has been built. Do not select it from the "Projects" tab.
I am in a debate about what a best practice would be for naming projects within a .sln on our team. We are working in Visual Studio and debating about what the project naming and placement of classes should be. Here are the two arguments:
There should be a "Common" project which will contain two folders: "Contracts" and "Model". Within "Contracts" folder will be the interfaces and of course within "Model" folder will be the data model. The advantage to this is that there will only be one .dll published which will have both the model and contracts within it.
There should be a "Model" project and a "Contracts" project. "Model" project should contain the data model and the "Contracts" project will contain the interfaces. The advantage here is in the naming, you know what will be in each .dll.
So simplified the question really is, is it better to have two separate projects or one project for the interfaces and model?
I'd separate them into separate projects. Your solution will likely include more DLLs, and you'll want to be able to access the interfaces from any of them. If you dump them into the same DLL with your Models, you run a higher risk of a circular dependency down the road.
It depends, I would keep projects on RE USABILITY basis. Means each project specific to content oriented.
Also note even after keeping separate you can merge them in single dll. So you objective of naming will also be achieved.