How can I know which header/c file to include into a project

[Ed Wios]

Hi there,

I am new to the nRF world and I might be asking a very stupid question with obvious answer but I couldn't find any hint from the Infocenter nor the Tutorials, therefore, I really appreciate if you could shed some light here.

I am using gcc arm on Mac, and am able to compile and run a few projects of my own without any issue at all (thanks NoridcSemi for allowing developers their own freedom of choice of development platforms and such a great SDK, exactly why I have left TI's CC26xx).

However, one thing I keep struggling hard is the way to find the proper include files and the .c files required for a particular function or MACRO.

I have browsed many answers to those asking similar, though more specific questions, those answers are very direct - for this function, you need to include this header and that c file, never mentioning how these header/.c files were identified in the first place.

Say, for example, if I am to add the capacitive sensor feature to my project, I read up the SDK Common Libraries -> Capacitive sensor support where it detailed the Data Structures | Macros | Typedefs | Functions of the module, however, there is no mentioning of any .h or .c I need to include into the project. How do I know if I need to include some other headers for the marco NRF_DRV_COMP_CONF_DEFAULT_CONFIG()? Occasionally, for a certain typedef, I could find the information to the header file but it seems not generally available.

Right now, I have to do a manual diff from some of the existing examples but this should not be the case, and it is also error prone and time consuming.

So, how can I know what to include?

Thanks and Regards,
Ed

[butch]

The way I do it is to iterate: compile. When you get an undefined symbol, >cd to the SDK directory and >grep -R . That gives you a list files the symbol is in. Manually hunt for the .h file that defines the symbol (many files may reference the symbol.) Modify your makefile: add INC_PATHS += the directory above said file. Iterate. I know it is nasty. But I don't think there is any document that gives the graph of dependencies.

[Ed Wios]

Yes, this is what I am doing, too. It is a bit unbelievable and sad that the documents provided lacked such important information. There are 200+ views and no answer so far makes me believe this is indeed the case.

[butch]

Probably there is no document since it would be large and have many versions. The SDK seems to change its structure often. The SDK seems to have some spurious includes, not really needed. The build system could be improved (CMake?). C/C++ is mind-numbingly stupid (Rust?). But so far, I prefer the Nordic total package over the many alternatives.