Question

How can I get multiple item metadata with the same name in a c# msbuild task, for example if I were to have:

 <ItemGroup>        <Assemblies Include = 'S:\SVN\SomeDirectory\src\'>      <excludeAssembly>AssemblyName_1</excludeAssembly>      <excludeAssembly>AssemblyName_2</excludeAssembly>      <excludeAssembly>AssemblyName_3</excludeAssembly>      <excludeAssembly>AssemblyName_4</excludeAssembly>    </Assemblies>  </ItemGroup> 

How would I get a list of all <excludeAssembly> metadata if normally one would use:

var itemData = itemTask.GetMetadata('excludeAssembly') 

to get single metadata values. I need to get a list of <excludeAssembly> values

Answer 1

Metadata is different than item, you can have different metadatas for one item but only one value for a metadata.

Using Reflector on Microsoft.Build.Engine assembly (BuildItem.EvaluateAllItemMetadata(…)), you see that metadata for an item are stored in a Dictionnary, so for a given metadata name you can have only one value.

A workaround in your case is too use metadata as name for item, like this:

<ItemGroup>       <Assemblies Include = 'S:\SVN\SomeDirectory\src\'>     <excludeAssembly>exludeAssemblySet</excludeAssembly>   </Assemblies> </ItemGroup>  <ItemGroup>   <exludeAssemblySet Include='AssemblyName_1'/>   <exludeAssemblySet Include='AssemblyName_2'/>   <exludeAssemblySet Include='AssemblyName_3'/>   <exludeAssemblySet Include='AssemblyName_4'/> </ItemGroup>  // Approximative syntax, I don't know what you want to do var itemData = itemTask.GetMetadata('excludeAssembly'); BuildItemGroup excludeAssemblies = project.GetEvaluatedItemsByName(itemData);