For building on UNIX and UNIX-like (GNU/Linux, Max OS X, Cygwin, MinGW-MSYS) platforms Xerces-C++ uses the GNU automake-based build systems and requires that you have GNU make installed. On some platforms GNU make is called gmake instead of make.

As with all automake-based projects the build process is divided into two parts: configuration and building. The configuration part is performed using the configure script that can be found in the xerces-c-3.1.1 directory. The build part is performed by invoking make.

Besides the standard configure options which you can view by running configure --help, Xerces-C++ provides a number of project-specific options that are worth mentioning. You can specify one option for each category outlined below. If you do not specify anything for a particular category then configure will select the most appropriate default. At the end of its execution configure prints the selected values for each category.

Net Accessor (used to access network resources):

Transcoder (used to convert between internal UTF-16 and other encodings):

Message Loader (used to access diagnostics messages):

Thread support is enabled by default and can be disabled with the --disable-threads option.

By default configure selects both shared and static libraries. You can use the --disable-shared and --disable-static options to avoid building the version you don't need.

Finally, to make the build process cleaner the Xerces-C++ build system hides actual compiler commands being executed by make. If you would like to see those then you can specify the --disable-pretty-make option.

If you need to specify compiler executables that should be used to build Xerces-C++, you can set the CC and CXX variables when invoking configure. Similarly, if you need to specify additional compiler or linker options, you can set the CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, and LDFLAGS variables. For example:

	./configure --disable-static CC=gcc-4.3 CXX=g++-4.3 CFLAGS=-O3 CXXFLAGS=-O3

Once the configuration part is complete you can run make (or gmake). Running make from the xerces-c-3.1.1 directory builds Xerces-C++ library and examples. The library is placed into the src/.libs directory. If you like to build only the library, you can run make from xerces-c-3.1.1/src.

If you would like to build the tests and run the automated test suite, run make check from the xerces-c-3.1.1 directory. The automated test suite required Perl and the diff command.

Finally, to install the library and examples you can run make install (or gmake install). To change the installation directory, use the --prefix configure option.

Some platforms and configurations require extra configure and make options which are shown in the following table.

Note that different UNIX platforms use different system environment variable for finding shared libraries. On Linux and Solaris, the environment variable name is LD_LIBRARY_PATH, on AIX it is LIBPATH, on Mac OS X it is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, and on HP-UX it is SHLIB_PATH.

Note that Cygwin and MinGW are different from the UNIX platforms in the way they find shared libraries at run time. While UNIX platforms may use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable, Cygwin and MinGW use the PATH environment variable.

Xerces-C++ source distribution comes with Microsoft Visual C++ projects and solutions. The following describes the steps you need to build with this compiler.

To build Xerces-C++ from the source distribution you will need to open the solution containing the project. The solutions containing the Xerces-C++ project files are in the following sub-directories in the xerces-c-3.1.1 directory:

	(For VC7.1) projects\Win32\VC7.1\xerces-all\xerces-all.sln (For VC8.0) projects\Win32\VC8\xerces-all\xerces-all.sln (For VC9.0) projects\Win32\VC9\xerces-all\xerces-all.sln (For VC10.0) projects\Win32\VC10\xerces-all\xerces-all.sln

Once you have the solution open, you need to build the project named XercesLib. You can select Debug/Release, Static/DLL, and, for VC8, VC9, and VC10, 32/64 bit builds using the Configuration Manager dialog. You can also select whether the Xerces-C++ library should use ICU for transcoding.

When building your own applications you need to make sure that you are linking your application with the xerces-c_3.lib (Release) and/or xerces-c_3D.lib (Debug) libraries (or the static versions of them) and also that the associated DLLs are somewhere in the executable/DLL search path (PATH).

If you are linking your application to the static Xerces-C++ library, then you will need to compile your application with the XERCES_STATIC_LIBRARY preprocessor macro defined in order to turn off the DLL import/export mechanism.

If you would also like to build tests and/or samples, inside the solution files mentioned above, you'll find several other projects which are for the tests and samples. Select all the tests/samples that you would like to build and then right click on the selection. Choose "Build (selection only)" to build all the selected projects in one shot.

Xerces-C++ source distribution comes with the Borland C++ makefiles. The following describes the steps you need to build Xerces-C++ with this compiler.

1. Change to the xerces-c-3.1.1\projects\Win32\BCC5\Xerces-all directory
2. Run MakeBuildDirs.bat
3. make -f Xerces-all.mak to build the library, examples, and tests.