Compiling source files in LyciaStudio

Compilation is a process of reading the source code written in 4GL and translating it into the native code.

You can learn all the details of how compilation and linking is implemented in Lycia here.

Usually, source files are not compiled one-by-one but together with other source and resource files when a program or project (or - less often - working set or the whole workspace) is built.

This is done for two reasons:

• if you have many sources files in a program/project, it will take a lot of time to compile all of them one-by-one; and
• after compiling your source files manually, you will not get a built application because some resource (e.g., themes, css styles, images) were not processed and the application executable was not created.

Usually, 4gl developers compile a single source file when they need to quickly check it for errors.

Besides compilation, Lycia supports recompilation – forced compilation of the source files which have already been compiled before.

You can both compile and recompile source files from LyciaStudio – from the context menu of the 4GL Project view:

To compile or recompile several source files at once, you must select them with the enabled Shift or Ctrl key and then go to the context menu:

Compiling progress and results are displayed in the Console view:

After compiling, the source file is marked accordingly - as successfully compiled or failed:

Errors, warnings, and other information obtained during the compiling is displayed in the Problems view.