How do you build Xalan-C with Visual Studio 2010? - xml-parsing

Question

I can not find proof that it's possible. After 40 hours of driving myself to insanity, I'm left with a situation where I cannot build the Localization project that supposedly builds a header file needed by the poorly named AllInOne project (which builds Xalan-C.lib, natch).
This library is software malpractice writ-large, I am desperate for an answer because it is a dependency in another library that I have no alternative to using.

Answer 1

I have managed to build Xalan-C version 1.11, compatible with the latest version of Xerces-C (v3.1.1), in Visual Studio 2010. I don't know if it is possible with earlier versions, however these are the steps I followed in order to build with version 1.11:
Xerces-C has to be built as a dynamic library to obtain the xerces-c_3_1D.dll file which MsgCreator.exe is dependent on.
Clone the github repository to obtain the source code of Xalan-C version 1.11.
Set the environment variables XERCESCROOT and XALANCROOT in windows (not in Visual Studio).
XERCESCROOT The Xerces-C/C++ installation directory
XALANCROOT The Xalan-C/C++ source directory
Open the Xalan-C solution in VS2010 and build the MsgCreator project.
Copy the xerces-c_3_1D.dll file from the Xerces-C build and place it in the Xalan-C build folder, the same folder where MsgCreator.exe is located.
Now it is possible to generate the "missing" header files (LocalMsgIndex.hpp and LocalMsgData.hpp) that are needed to build the "AllInOne" project.
Run MsgCreator.exe in cmd with the provided path to XalanMsg_en_US.xlf which is located in $(XALANCROOT)\src\xalanc\NLS\en_US and what method to use when building the locale messages.
MsgCreator.exe $(XALANCROOT)\src\xalanc\NLS\en_US\XalanMsg_en_US.xlf -TYPE=inmem
(I used -TYPE=inmem, but check to see what method is best suited for your solution)
The header files are now generated and located in the build directory (where MsgCreator.exe resides). Copy or move them to $(XALANCROOT)\src and they should now be able to be located.
Now build the XalanMsgLib project.
And the last thing to do before the final build is to handle the including of afxres.h in the AllInOne.rc file (located in $(XALANCROOT)\Projects\Win32\Res\AllInOne). Visual Studio Express edition does not contain the MFC library which contains the afxres.h header. I simply changed it to #include "windows.h" instead.
And now it should be possible to build "AllInOne" successfully.

Answer 2

I struggled with this also and this is my recipe (VS2015 but look up the cmake docs for other IDEs)
Note I was specifically targeting xerces 3.2.3 and xalan 1.12. Use git tag to get the versions you need
git clone https://github.com/apache/xerces-c.git
cd xerces-c
git checkout v3.2.3
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -BVS2015 -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" -A x64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cd VS2015
devenv xerces-c.sln /Build Debug /Project ALL_BUILD
Because I use this with another build process that expects things in a certain way:
(assume you set up a target dir env called XERCESBUILD with bin/lib child dirs)
copy src\Debug\*.dll %XERCESBUILD%\bin
copy src\Debug\*.lib %XERCESBUILD%\lib
Then for xalan
git clone https://github.com/apache/xalan-c
cd xalan-c
git checkout Xalan-C_1_12_0
mkdir build
cd build
set PATH=%PATH%;%XERCESBUILD%\bin
cmake .. -BVS2015 -G "Visual Studio 14 2015" -A x64 -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=%JBCRELEASEDIR% -DXALAN_DEBUG=1 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DXerce
sC_LIBRARY_DEBUG=%XERCESBUILD%\lib\xerces-c_3D.lib
cd VS2015
devenv xalan-c.sln /Build Debug /Project ALL_BUILD
Note the xerces-c_3D.lib is specifically the Debug build so remove the D when doing the Release build.