Project Templates

Overview

You can adapt how to create new projects. The IDE allows to register your own project types via designtime packages. The package projtemplates (the normal lazarus binary packages have this preinstalled) allows to simply use existing projects as templates.

Package projtemplates

This package implements project templates and comes with the lazarus sources (components/projecttemplates/projtemplates.lpk).

The package comes preinstalled with the binary packages of Lazarus (e.g. the windows installer). This package adds a category to the File-New dialog: Template projects

It also adds a New project from Template menu item to the File menu, as well as a project template options menu under the Tools menu. This menu item is visible only if the templates directory (see next paragraph) exists and contains at least one template subdirectory.

In the Project template options, a directory can be selected. This directory should contain a subdirectory per template. Each template directory contains a template for a project: A collection of files which will be copied and used as a new project.

During the copy, the package will scan the file/directory names and the contents of the files for variable substitution: __VARNAME__ will be replaced by the value of a variable VARNAME

By default, the engine knows 2 variables:

• ProjDir: The directory where the new project will be created.
• ProjName: The name of the project.

Additional variables must be defined in a file called project.ini in the directory of the project. This is a file in Windows INI format.

The section [Variables] will be scanned for variable names:

[Variables]
VarName1=Description 1
VarName2=Description 2

The variables found will be presented with their description in a dialog, and the user must present a value for the variables.

The' 'project.ini file can contain a second section, called Project, which can contain some info about the project. The following keywords can be found there:

ProjectFile

Any file that has a name equal to this (no extension) is treated specially, it is renamed to the project name. That is ProjectFile=example will replace example.lpi, example.lpr and example.cfg with the name given by the user. By default, the value of ProjectFile is assumed to be project. (note that the .ini file is not copied)

Name

Name of the template. The Name and description will be presented in the 'File-New' dialog.

Author

Author of the template

Description

Short (one-line) description of the project. The Name and description will be presented in the 'File-New' dialog.

Recurse

A boolean value (1/0) which tells the engine to recurse in subdirectories or not.

Exclude

Comma separated list of filename extensions which should not be searched for keyword subsitution.