Adventures with Azure: Swagger and XML Comments

For my API projects I like to generate XML comments that are used in conjunction with Swagger to provide better guidance on how to use the API, from methods to models.

To do this, I just add the following snippet of code to my Startup.cs file:

In the above example I want to include XML comments for both my Business Domain layer and WebApi layer.

Then in each of my projects I set XML documentation file to checked.

This will include my XML documents in my Swagger documentation.

When I run it locally, it works great!

But when I push it to Azure, the site generates an error.

Digging a little deeper, I discovered that a FileNotFoundException was being thrown for both my XML files.

Taking a close look at the project settings, I saw what the issue was, when the project was built it was NOT generating the XML files to a relative path, but rather to my computer’s path.

After searching around I finally figured out that I needed to modify my .csproj file to look like the below:

This would now generate the XML files based on a relative path for both DEBUG and RELEASE.

Once I made this change and redeployed, life was good again.

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