CLI can easily fail and blow project up on windows when you have multiple plugins.

[teobugslayer]

From @NathanaelA on February 25, 2016 23:55

Windows only supports 255 character length paths... This is VERY IMPORTANT to this issue!

For some reason the CLI is creating a really long path for merging stuff using the names of each installed plugin. So for example when using 8 plugins if each of them are an average of 22 characters (nativescript = 12 by itself, almost every plugin is prefixed with those 12 characters). = 176 characters.

So If I have D:\projects\nativescript\projname = 35
Then you add in \platforms\android\build\intermediates\res\merged = 59
(176 in Plugin name characters) = 172
Then you add the image part of the path \debug\drawable-xxhdpi\someimage.png = 49

= 315 Characters. Guess what happens. No Worky 😀 and now your platform folder is totally screwed up.

THIS IS A BAD ISSUE! It leaves the project effectively dead.
Plugins I was using:
"nativescript-barcodescanner": "^1.2.0",
"nativescript-cardview": "^0.1.1",
"nativescript-dom": "^1.0.0",
"nativescript-drop-down": "^1.2.1",
"nativescript-grid-view": "^1.3.0",
"nativescript-liveedit": "file:..\repos\nativescript-liveedit",
"nativescript-sqlite": "file:..\repos\nativescript-sqlite",
"nativescript-telerik-ui": "file:..\nativescript-ui-debug-dev.tgz",
"tns-core-modules": "^1.6.2"

Then I attempted to add: nativescript-floatingactionbutton

This is a BLOCKING issue for most people when they hit this. I have some ways I think I can work around this.

Copied from original issue: NativeScript/nativescript-cli#1546

[teobugslayer]

From @NathanaelA on February 26, 2016 2:28

Ok; for anyone who runs into this -- this is a gradle issue, not a TNS specific issue.
However, the issue is still the same. Gradle / aapt apparently has a couple bugs already in for this:
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=187430
https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=160994

Who knows when they will be fixed; but their is a way to mitigate the primary issue I ran into. The include.gradle files internal names can be shortened.

Inside the include.gradle files are a section that (example nativescript-cardview) looks like this

android {
    productFlavors {
        "nativescriptcardview" {
            dimension "nativescriptcardview"
        }
    }
}

Edit and make it look like this:

android {
    productFlavors {
        "nscv" {
            dimension "nscv"
        }
    }
}

Now the plugin only uses 4 characters rather than 20 characters. By doing this to all the existing include.gradle files the size was reduced to considerably under the 255 length.

A couple notes, this could be done via the CLI automatically; We would make the CLI when it copies over the include.gradle files automatically shorten the name... When it generates a new default include.gradle it uses a shortened name.

[teobugslayer]

From @Daxito on February 26, 2016 3:30

Is there a way to know when we run into this issue? Any error message or something?

[teobugslayer]

From @NathanaelA on February 26, 2016 4:8

In my case it threw lots of error messages about aapt not being able to process some of the png files. At the end it just says gradlew failed.

Here is one of the many errors sets (each error has these 5 lines)

AAPT out(1144172198) : No Delegate set : lost message:Crunching D:\projects\nativescript\test1\platforms\android\build\intermediates\exploded-aar\barcodescanner-release\res\drawable\flip_camera.png
AAPT out(1144172198) : No Delegate set : lost message:Crunching single PNG file: D:\projects\nativescript\test1\platforms\android\build\intermediates\exploded-aar\barcodescanner-release\res\drawable\flip_camera.png
AAPT out(1144172198) : No Delegate set : lost message:  Output file: D:\projects\nativescript\test1\platforms\android\build\intermediates\res\merged\nativescript-barcodescannernativescriptcardviewnativescriptfloatingactionbuttonnativescript-liveeditnativescript-telerik-ui\debug\drawable\flip_camera.png
AAPT out(1144172198) : No Delegate set : lost message:Error
AAPT out(1144172198) : No Delegate set : lost message:Done

And then finally tns reports:

Command D:\projects\nativescript\test1\platforms\android\gradlew.bat failed with exit code 1

[Plamen5kov]

The problem is we currently make every plugin into a flavor (which is not the brightest idea), and gradle includes every flavor name to the name of the package somewhere in the build folder
This problem will automatically go away if there are only include.gradle, .aar files in the plugin's platforms/android folder.
Then gradle won't have to concat these plugin names at all.

[NathanaelA]

@Plamen5kov Well that is good that only occurs in certain cases. But odds are likely when you have several plugins that at least one of them has a .jar.

Question though that you might know:

productFlavors {
        "nscv" {
            dimension "nscv"
        }
}

1. Do productFlavors Key and the dimension key have to be the same value? And if not which one of those does it use to concatenate?

[Plamen5kov]

Hi, @NathanaelA
Odds really are that a plugin would have .jar and that's why the .aar format may include java source code that is later .jar-ed. Another option, still available would be to put a normal .jar inside <plugin-name>/platforms/android/ folder but it would have to be only custom source code which does not require any additional resources.
If you have the scenario where you need to use resources, you would need to use the .aar format, either by dragging it along with the plugin or simply by referencing it in the <plugin-name>/platforms/android/include.gradle file.
And as for the question: The productFlavors key needs to hold the same name as plugin's name in the package.json file. You can read more about flavor dimensions here.

[NathanaelA]

@PanayotCankov - Ok.

On my question; your answer doesn't match what I have found out.

productFlavors {
        "nscv" {
            dimension "nscv"
        }
}

This is actually the changed include.gradle file I'm using for the nativescript-cardview. This works perfectly fine and I did NOT change the name in the package.json or any other files of any of the plugins. I also did this same change to 5 or so other plugin's include.gradle files to use the 4-5 character shortened names. Everything builds and is working properly. So the include.gradle doesn't care about the package.json names as far as I can see..

[Plamen5kov]

Hi, @NathanaelA

• So the include.gradle doesn't care about the package.json names as far as I can see.., your's is an isolated case, because you have only an include.gradle file.
• ...did this same change to 5 or so other plugin's include.gradle files... again if they only had an include.gradle file there shouldn't be any issues. And if there is an AndroidManifest.xml there is a possibility for them to build but not work properly.

The the cases I'm talking about include other scenarios which will be depricated soon. You can read more about them here, having in mind the linked documentation.

@NathanaelA it would be great if you be more careful while trying to @mention somebody.

[NathanaelA]

@Plamen5kov - Ok, So if I am following you; those cases you are talking about are going away and re-naming the fields inside the include.gradle will even be safer in the future. As it is currently the only way to get around this issue on windows. From what I gather from the changes in the docs, you will be pre-merging (during installation of the plugin) the android manifest to the master one now in /app/app_resources/android?

On the @mention, oy -- I can't believe I did that. Sorry PanayotCankov.

[Plamen5kov]

@NathanaelA there will be no need for any naming at all.

productFlavors {
        "nscv" {
            dimension "nscv"
        }
}

This whole block, will no longer be necessary.

It will be a breaking change for some plugins, and the scenarios I've described in the docs are what will be asked of developers to migrate to the new version of the plugins.
The unfortunate fact is, it will be a breaking change.
The good news is, for most plugins the migration should be easy.

I will take care of describing in detail how to migrate the current plugins!

Keep in mind the change won't happen overnight and you will have proper time to prepare and migrate the plugins.

[NathanaelA]

Oh, very SWEET! Is this a 1.7, 1.8 or something scheduled for the whole world breaks 2.0? 😀

[Plamen5kov]

We haven't talked about it yet but it will be no earlier than 1.8