Using relative path for bitmaps in JSON uidesc

Developer VSTGUI
1

Hello. I noticed that the VSTGUI 4.x editor allows to add bitmaps (PNG) and writes the full path of the file in the JSON uidesc file.
Here is the relevant portion of the uidesc file.

{
	"vstgui-ui-description": {
		"version": "1",
		"bitmaps": {
			"my_background": {
				"path": "C:\\Users\\Administrator\\Documents\\Visual Studio 2022\\Solutions\\VST_SDK\\vst3sdk\\public.sdk\\samples\\vst\\my_plugin\\resource\\my_background.png"
			}
		},

It seems there is a way to embed the filestream inside the JSON file.
That would be helpful and tidier, because it doesn’t seem to allow relative paths, unless I expect the base path to be somewhere else that it is. I thought that the base path is : %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\VST3, supposing that the vst3 plugin file resides here.
For your information, I don’t use bundles.

Could someone clarify this issue and also provide file embedding information ?
Help appreciated.

2

I settled to use %ProgramData% to store the plugin assets, but using environment variables in the path does not seem to work well.

3

After some looking at the uidescription.cpp

void UIDescription::setFilePath (UTF8StringPtr path)
{
	impl->filePath = path;
	impl->uidescFile.u.name = impl->filePath.data (); // make sure that xmlFile.u.name points to valid memory
}

it shows that uidesc is loaded from a resource, which is how it should be.
Then,
I suppose that when building release, -DVST_GUI_LIVE_EDITING=0 is implicit. and all resources must be inside the rc file for the plugin to load them.
On the other hand, when using -DVST_GUI_LIVE_EDITING=1 in debug, the WYSIWYG editor loads assets from path defined inside the uidesc (and also use the uidesc file path to write the modified uidesc file), Which is why everything appears ok. I will add background images as resources in the rc file and hopefully it will solve the issue.

4

Problem solved.
PNG images should be declared as PNG type, not DATA in the rc file.
as such :

#define APSTUDIO_READONLY_SYMBOLS

myplug.uidesc DATA "myplug.uidesc"
mybitmap.png PNG "mybitmap.png"

Then the in the JSON uidesc :

{
	"vstgui-ui-description": {
		"version": "1",
		"bitmaps": {
			"mybitmap": {
				"path": "mybitmap.png"