Question

I’m trying to run a pre-build event which passes all the JavaScript files in a directory to MS’s Ajax Minifier. Unfortunately, this tool excepts file names as individual arguments (it cannot parse “*.js”). I have quite a few JavaScript files and I really don’t want to list them individually in the pre-build event window.

This is my current pre-build command:

"$(SolutionDir)Tools\AjaxMin.exe" "$(ProjectDir)*.js" -out  "$(ProjectDir)Generated\Generated.js" -clobber

Does anyone know the proper syntax (or if there even is one) to make this do what you’d expect it to do?

Thanks for any assistance.

Answer 1

Prebuild event is passed to shell that is why you can set a cmd-script like below as a pre-build event:

::Force variables to be evaluated at execution time
SETLOCAL ENABLEDELAYEDEXPANSION

SET parameter=
SET proj=$(ProjectDir)*.js

::Concatenate all the file names (surrounded by quotes) into a single string
FOR %%F IN ("%proj%") DO (SET parameter=!parameter! "%%F")

::Execute command
"$(SolutionDir)Tools\AjaxMin.exe" %parameter% -out  "$(ProjectDir)Generated\Generated.js" -clobber

Here we are accumulating all js filenames in parameter variable and passing it to ajaxmin.exe.