2.1 Usage Overview

The DEC file supports EDK II module builds. The file is used to define specific information that will be shared between different EDK II Modules. There are eight possible major section types in the DEC file, Defines, Includes, LibraryClasses, Guids, Protocols, Ppis, PCD and UserExtensions.

Within a DEC file, comments are encouraged, with the hash "#" character identifying a comment. All text after a comment character must be ignored by any parsing tool. Comment characters can be at the start of a line, or after a data element (there must be one or more white space characters between the data element and the comment character. Examples:

# this is a comment line
[includes.common] # This is also a valid comment.

[includes.common # This is not valid]

The last example is not valid, as the section header data element format is [text] with the square brackets included as part of the data element.

Note: All EDK II DEC files MUST use the forward slash character for all directory paths specified.

The remainder of this chapter discusses the different section content usage.