Qt Creator: how to embed custom manifest in .exe

Question

I have a custom Manifest file and would like to embed it inside the executable. I use MS Visual Studio 2010 compiler and Qt 5.2.1.

I use Qt Creator as the IDE and CMake for making release builds. What options should I set in .pro and CMake files?

I tried to pass '/MANIFEST...' like flags to the linker, but they seem to be unsupported by VS 2010 linker.

Answer 1

Eventually I've found the solution.

First it is necessary to add the following line to the .pro file:

CONFIG -= embed_manifest_exe

this will disable embedding of the default manifest file. After that it is necessary to add a windows resource file:

RC_FILE = app_resources.rc

.rc file is usually included to embed version information into .exe, but as soon as manifest is also a part of the executable resources we could reference a custom manifest file in it, just add the following line into app_resources.rc:

1 24 myapp.exe.manifest

where 1 is the resource ID, 24 is the resource type - RT_MANIFEST, and myapp.exe.manifest is the file with our custom manifest. If you don't need version info then app_resources.rc may contain just this single line.

That's it.

For CMake the steps are as follows:

1) include app_resources.rc in the list of sources of the target

2) add the following line to disable embedding of a default manifest file:

set(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "/MANIFEST:NO")

For some unknown for me reasons /MANIFEST:NO didn't work in .pro file. The linker failed with an unknown option error. However it works in CMake. The linker is the same from VS 2010...