Skip to content

It is difficult to find documentation about "PRI files" by searching Bing or Google #2798

Open
@citelao

Description

@citelao

I recently helped explain PRI files to a colleague. They were confused what they were used for and why they were necessary for our builds.

With perhaps a few more sentences of basic introduction, the Resource Management System page would have been a great overview for them, but they did not discover the page when searching for help (they searched for PRI files on MSDN, Bing, and OSGWiki [internal]).

Ask

I think we need to do some SEO for this page.

  • Make the page title immediately relevant
    • They recommended: add "PRI file" to the page title somehow
    • Alternative: create a separate "PRI file" overview that explains what these files are and what they do.
  • Make sure the term "PRI file" appears verbatim in the text (instead of Package Resource Index (PRI) file every time)
  • Be clearer in the definition about what a PRI file is—the bullet points comingle definition (A PRI file contains actual string resources, and an indexed set of file paths that refer to various files in the package., Each PRI file contains a named collection of resources, referred to as a resource map. When a PRI file from a package is loaded, the resource map name is verified to match the package identity name.) and technical information (The resources.pri file at the root of each package is automatically loaded when the ResourceManager is instantiated.), which is confusing.

Happy to discuss this further and help as needed!

Appendix: definitional context

The summary I ended up giving was just a few sentences, and is largely included on the Resource Management System page (though a bit hard to find, as described above):

The reason you must deploy the PRI file is simple: that's the file that holds the compiled XAML [and localized resources like strings]! So when you change the XAML, you need to deploy the PRI to see your changes. The .cpp and .h files are built into the DLL, which you also have to deploy, but everything else lives in PRI. As that page also explains, you can use the MakePRI tool to inspect PRI files and see the actual strings that are inside them

(vs A PRI file contains actual string resources, and an indexed set of file paths that refer to various files in the package.)

Appendix: state of search results

I've attached some search screenshots. The best link I see is to Package resource indexing (PRI) APIs and custom build systems, probably because the title has the text PRI in it:

Search for "pri file msdn" on Bing

Search for "pri file msdn" on Google


Document Details

Do not edit this section. It is required for docs.microsoft.com ➟ GitHub issue linking.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Pri2data-and-files/techdoc-bugfeedback is about something that is out of date, unclear, confusing, or broken in the articleuwp/prod

Type

No type

Projects

No projects

Milestone

No milestone

Relationships

None yet

Development

No branches or pull requests

Issue actions