Importing source files and folders into IAR Workbench
I have a cup of source files in a certain folder structure in my file system. I want to use this structure for a project in the IAR Workbench. Thinking of Eclipse, that could be so easy! But in the IAR Workbench, the folders will become to "Groups", which are only kind of virtual folders. The Workbench doesn't care about folders. Is there some easy and fast way to import them? Up to now I have to add the groups manually each and then add the files to the groups, and that's really annoying! Is there maybe a tool to generate a proper project file (*.ewp) out of a file/folder structure path?
This would help me a lot!
Answer
You should have a look at IAR Project/Add Project Connection command.
Although IAR doesn't seem to have any public documentation on the xml syntax, or at least I couldn't find any, you can find Infineon DAVE (Config.xml) and Freescale PE (ProjectInfo.xml) files if you search around. These can be used as examples to figure out the syntax on how to write your own xml files in one of these interfaces, to allow you to specify where all your c, h, assembly and library files are from where ever they may be in your file system. They also allow you to define preprocessor includes for compiler/assembler, and DAVE allows you to define a path variable, which is also very useful.
See: https://mcuoneclipse.com/2013/11/01/iar-arm-v6-7-comes-with-improved-processor-expert-support/
I have modified a DAVE Config.xml file and found it EXTREMELY useful for managing and migrating even just a handful of project files. For example to upgrade to a new release with all files having a new directory root, you just change a single line in the xml file (defining the new root), and all source files, compiler includes etc are all updated to the new level. No more manually editing the preprocessor includes or replacing all the files in the project. And no more fiddling around with ../../ file system hierarchy navigation stuff, you just specify directly (or indirectly via a path to) where the files are, no more relative from where your project happens to be. VERY NICE.
IAR should consider opening this up (documenting) for general users, as it is very useful for project management and migration. While at it they should also consider generalizing the xml syntax a little bit and allow for definition of IAR group heading names, specifying linker file name, and definitely allowing multiple xml files to be included (connected) (so that subprojects can be easily added or removed without effecting the other subproject definition files) and a few basic things like that.
If they where to do a bang up job on this, they might consider allowing most/all aspects of IAR project configuration that might be required by the subproject, to be defined in these xml files, and then entire (sub)projects could just be plopped down anywhere and be up an running extremely quickly (OK, just let me dream a bit :)