Run tests with custom DLL locations

[peakschris]

Hi there,

We are trying to get csharp_nunit_test working with a particular dotnet library in our product that has some interesting requirements. Let's call it business.dll. At runtime, business.dll looks for a folder named 'plugins' (relative to directory containing business.dll) and loads all DLLs inside that directory.

The source layout is:

src\dotnet\business\BUILD.bazel (business.dll)
src\dotnet\plugin1\BUILD.bazel (plugin1.dll)
src\dotnet\plugin2\BUILD.bazel (plugin2.dll)
src\dotnet\tests\BUILD.bazel(test)

The test is:

csharp_nunit_test(
    srcs = glob(["*.cs"]),
    deps = [
         "//src/dotnet/business",
         "//src/dotnet/plugin1",
         "//src/dotnet/plugin2",
    ],
)

The issue is, at runtime, the plugin DLLs are located in a mirror of their src tree locations instead of in a plugins subdirectory at the same parent directory of business.dll

I have tried using aspect copy_file and copy_to_directory to move the DLLs around and then make the test depend on the copied targets, but this does not seem to work

What is the correct way to get this working? I can't edit the code inside business.dll - should not put bazel logic inside our product.

Thanks!

[purkhusid]

Hmm, this is a side effect of the rules doing an optimization where we don't copy the DLLs to the root of every target. This is a fairly significant optimization so I'm not ready drop it but I think we could probably add a flag to the _library/_binary/_test targets where we would use the same logic as in the publish_binary rule. This would allow end users to have the same behaviour in their tests as is in MSBuild. I'm afraid I don't have the time to do this at the moment but I would be open to an contribution.

The main work in this would be to extract the copying logic from publish_binary and reuse it in the other rules behind an attribute.

Possible workarounds that I can imagine would work:

• Create a copy_to_directory target in the same folder as the business.dll is located and then depend on the copy targets in data
• Wrap the test in an script that copies the plugin dlls to the location of the business.dll