ItemDefinitionGroup element (MSBuild)

Article
03/13/2017

The ItemDefinitionGroup element lets you define a set of Item Definitions, which are metadata values that are applied to all items in the project, by default. ItemDefinitionGroup supersedes the need to use the CreateItem task and the CreateProperty task. For more information, see Item definitions.

Syntax

<ItemDefinitionGroup Condition="'String A' == 'String B'">
    <Item1>... </Item1>
    <Item2>... </Item2>
</ItemDefinitionGroup>

Attributes and elements

The following sections describe attributes, child elements, and parent elements.

Attributes

Attribute	Description
`Condition`	Optional attribute. Condition to be evaluated. For more information, see Conditions.

Child elements

Element	Description
Item	Defines the inputs for the build process. There may be zero or more `Item` elements in an `ItemDefinitionGroup`.

Parent elements

Element	Description
Project	Required root element of an MSBuild project file.

Example

The following code example defines two metadata items, m and n, in an ItemDefinitionGroup. In this example, the default metadata "m" is applied to Item "i" because metadata "m" is not explicitly defined by Item "i". However, default metadata "n" is not applied to Item "i" because metadata "n" is already defined by Item "i".

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <ItemDefinitionGroup>
        <i>
            <m>m1</m>
            <n>n1</n>
        </i>
    </ItemDefinitionGroup>
    <ItemGroup>
        <i Include="a">
            <o>o1</o>
            <n>n2</n>
        </i>
    </ItemGroup>
    ...
</Project>

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