Fix single instance broken

[davidroth]

I was debugging why my electron app does not respect the singleInstance property and found out that commit 688d6d8 regressed the single instance behaviour.

Problem: Commit 688d6d8 changed the check to == 'yes' but the configuration uses true.

[davidroth]

@FlorianRappl I tested it with my changes and it works now (both enabling + disabling). Not exactly sure why you changed it to "yes" in the original commit -maybe you can clarify? Thanks 😀

Tested by running the following command in the published output dir:

Manipulate "package.json" and configure "singleInstance" to either "true" or "false"

Run app twice via:

node node_modules/electron/cli.js main.js -unpackedelectron

Previously:

App always runs twice.

[github-actions]

pr-comment: Run #13

Tests 📝	Passed ✅	Failed ❌	Skipped ⏭️	Pending ⏳	Other ❓	Flaky 🍂	Duration ⏱️
1274	1130	0	0	0	144	0	3m 50s

🎉 All tests passed!

Github Test Reporter by CTRF 💚

🔄 This comment has been updated

[FlorianRappl]

Yeah this I think is an artifact from the migration to pure .NET, i.e., no more serialization here. I think it might even make sense to remove the BuildInfo altogether. I don't see much value in this any more.

As far the issue - I think removal of the deserialization and comparing to True would be sufficient.

[softworkz]

The original mistake is in package.template.json:

"license": "$(License)",
 "executable": "$(TargetName)",
 "singleInstance": "$(ElectronSingleInstance)",
 "homepage": "$(ProjectUrl)",
 "splashscreen": {
   "imageFile": "$(ElectronSplashScreen)"
 },

The value should not be quoted.

And then in ElectronNET.LateImport.targets, this

<TemplateProperty Include="ElectronSingleInstance" Value="$(ElectronSingleInstance)" />

needs to be changed to this:

<TemplateProperty Include="ElectronSingleInstance" Value="$(ElectronSingleInstance.ToLower())" />

[softworkz]

Yeah this I think is an artifact from the migration to pure .NET, i.e., no more serialization here. I think it might even make sense to remove the BuildInfo altogether. I don't see much value in this any more.

BuildInfo is important. There are 3 internal usages:

For example, without it, the ElectronRuntime wouldn't know the name of the Electron executable to launch.

C# has no DEFINEs like C/C++, so it's not possible to get compile-time variables into the code, apart from the boolean-only definitions for conditional compilation.

Using assembly metadata attributes is an elegant replacement for this. The ElectronRuntime.BuildInfo unwraps those values, so that you don't need the ugly code everywhere for reading those attributes.

[softworkz]

@davidroth

Thanks a lot for the PR and bringing this to attention. This PR is close, but actually, that value should be a boolean in the first place, that's why #994 is a better way from my point of view.

[davidroth]

Closed in favour of #996