How to add an alias so that the library can be used outside the build

[shavesha]

My library is setup in a very similar manner to this:
modern cmake sample. I use an alias target in the top level CMakeLists file:

add_library(JSONUtils::jsonutils ALIAS jsonutils)

Then in the test folder CMakeLists I use the target:

target_link_libraries(json_utils_test gtest_main JSONUtils::jsonutils)

My question is given the above linked project as an example how can we apply modern cmake practices using conan. I am specifically interested in how to setup the tests folder CMakeLists to access the library through an alias.

[memsharded]

Hi @shavesha

There is the set_property() (https://docs.conan.io/en/latest/reference/conanfile/attributes.html?highlight=set_property#cpp-info), you can define in package_info() to inject your own build_module that could define an alias.

There is also some ongoing work to automate this a bit more: #8533, but the underlying tool will be that set_property with the "cmake_build_module".

In any case, I am not so sure that is a good practice. The non-namespaced jsonutils made sense to provide some kind of backwards compatibility to older findxxx.cmake scripts, but modern cmake packages define package::target targets, with namespace. I'd probably avoid that altogether, specially if you are going to consume the packages yourself.

[memsharded]

Closing this ticket as staled, please re-open or create a new one if necessary.