Recently a need arose to have a few project-level items added to a project via a NuGet package. While this was no big deal, we ran into an issue of having the items marked as “Copy if Newer” for the “Copy to Output Directory” action, and couldn’t manage to find a way to change these properties. After a bit of research, we determined that an install.ps1 PowerShell script (as part of the NuGet package installation) could access the project items and set the properties of them.
A script was written to handle the three files added to the project:
param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project)
$file1 = $project.ProjectItems.Item("FolderItem.exe")
$file2 = $project.ProjectItems.Item("FolderItem.exe.config")
$file1.Properties.Item("CopyToOutputDirectory").Value = [int]2
$file2.Properties.Item("CopyToOutputDirectory").Value = [int]2
Unfortunately, the script didn’t work. Why, you ask? Well, after some more digging, it turns out you can only access top-level items using the above syntax, so you have to chain the commands together to properly access the items:
param($installPath, $toolsPath, $package, $project)
$file1 = $project.ProjectItems.Item("Folder").ProjectItems.Item("Item.exe")
$file2 = $project.ProjectItems.Item("Folder").ProjectItems.Item("Item.exe.config")
$file1.Properties.Item("CopyToOutputDirectory").Value = [int]2
$file2.Properties.Item("CopyToOutputDirectory").Value = [int]2
