Building OPAL on Windows Craig Southeren Last updated 26 June 2006

Contents

1. Introduction

This document provides a thorough description of building OPAL using both MSVC 6 and VS.net 2003. These procedures are based on the procedures for building PWLib which must be completed before these steps can be performed.

2. Prerequisites

You will need the following to compile OPAL from source code:

• MSVC 6, VS.net 2003, VS.net 2005 or Visual C++ 2005 Expresss Edition. Note that you cannot use the free VS.net 2003 available from Microsoft as support for configuring that compiler without the GUI has not yet been completed. Visual C++ 2005 Expresss Edition is supported (follow the instructions for VS.net 2005)
  
• A compiled version of PWLib using the target environment. See this page for information on how to compile PWLib
  
• A copy of the OPAL source archive from the OpenH323 SourceForge download page or from CVS
  
• An archive extractor program that understand tar.gz files, and handles end of line characters correctly, like WinZIP 

3. Download and install the OPAL source code 

Download and extract the OPAL source code from the OpenH323 SourceForge download page or from CVS. If extracting the source from an archive, it is important to use program that can correctly handle tar.gz files can correctly process end of line characters. We strongly recommend WinZIP - other programs may not correct process end of line characters and will cause problems in later stages.

For the purposes of this document, the directory that contains OPAL will be indicated as installdir\OPAL

4. Configure directories 

Select "Tools" from the "Options" menu, and add the following directories settings as required

• Add installdir\OPAL\INCLUDE to the Include directory list
• Add installdir\OPAL\LIB to the Executable directory list
• Add installdir\OPAL\LIB to the Library directory list

See this document for how to set directories for your particular environment 

5. Compiling 

Regardless of the environment you are using, there are a number of different projects that can be built. The basic OPAL library can be built in three different ways:

1. Debug - full debug symbols and trace logging enabled. This provides the most information but is also generates the biggest output files
2. Release - no debug symbols, but full trace logging. This is smaller than the Debug version, but still allows full trace output
3. No Trace - no debug symbols, but and no trace logging. This creates the smallest output files, but does not allow trace logging

The static library versions of OPAL can be built independently, but building the OPAL DLLs requires building the "MERGESYM" utility from the Release version of PWLib. The codec DLLs do not require mergesym 

5a. MSVC 6

• Open the file installdir\OPAL\OPAL.DSW
  
• Make sure the "File view" tab is selected in the Workspace
  
• Select the build type as "Win32 Release", "Win32 Debug" or "Win32 No Trace" in the Build toolbar
  

• Right-click on "OPAL_lib files" and select "Build" from the menu to build opals.lib (or opalsd.lib if you are building the "Win32 Debug" version, or opalsn.lib if you are building the "Win32 No Trace" version). 

• Right-click on "OPAL_dll files" and select "Build" from the menu to build opal.lib and opal.dll (or opald.lib and opald.dll if you are building the "Win32 Debug" version, or opaln.lib and opaln.dll if you are building the "Win32 No Trace" version)

5b. VS.net 2003 and VS.net 2005

• Open the file installdir\OPAL\OPAL.SLN (VS.net 2003) and installdir\OPAL\OPAL_2005.SLN (VS.net 2005)
  
• Make sure the "Solution explorer" window is displayed
  
• Select the build type as "Release", "Debug" or "No Trace" in the Build toolbar
  

• Right-click on "OPAL_Lib" and select "Build" from the menu to opals.lib (or opalsd.lib if you are building the "Win32 Debug" version, or opalsn.lib if you are building the "Win32 No Trace" version). 

• Right-click on "OPAL_dll" and select "Build" from the menu to build opal.lib and opal.dll (or opald.lib and opald.dll if you are building the "Win32 Debug" version, or opaln.lib and opaln.dll if you are building the "Win32 No Trace" version). 

5c. Configure paths

If configure finds options in directories not belonging to other compilers, such as Cygwin,  MSys, or an incompatible Microsoft compiler, then please read the section 4.32 of the Opal/OpenH323 FAQ  on how to tailor the configure search path 

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