How to Include extra DLL in Plugin?

SDKs Plugins
1

I have a Windows plugin using the Zip package structure that works fine in Xojo. However, my main DLL needs to access a second DLL. I’ve tried to put the second DLL in various places in the plugin folder structure but nothing seems to work.

  1. During DEBUG the second DLL cannot be accessed by the main DLL.

  2. When you build a finished product, only the main DLL is included in the Lib folder so the developer must copy in the second DLL.

Any suggestions?

2

You can add a file to the RBX file quite easily (since they’re just VirtualVolumes) however I don’t think there’s any way to tell the IDE to use an arbitrary DLL file in the plugin. You might want to look into using Xojo’s build automation to copy necessary files at compile time.

3

I’m using the .xojo_plugin format which is just some nested folders/files that have been zipped and extension changed. I can include the extra DLL, but the IDE seems to ignore it. It doesn’t copy it into the MyApp Libs folder for a debug or non-debug build.

Perhaps Xojo’s build automation could do this extra step, but that would require extra effort from every developer using the plugin. It would seem that other plugins might need extra DLLs or support files so the IDE would have a mechanism to copy them from the plugin to the Libs folder during the build process.

4

It definitely would be nice to have a system for including additional resources to be put in a project if a plugin is used. Do you have a Feedback case for it?