# Automatically detecting generated dependencies

**URL:** <https://discourse.cmake.org/t/automatically-detecting-generated-dependencies/1183>\
**Category:** Usage\
**Created:** [May 11, 2020, 9:40pm UTC](https://discourse.cmake.org/t/automatically-detecting-generated-dependencies/1183 "2020-05-11T21:40:35Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 7

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**Author:** ![chris.olton](https://discourse.cmake.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/eb8c5e/32.png) [@chris.olton](https://discourse.cmake.org/u/chris.olton)\
**Post date:** [November 9, 2020, 8:07pm UTC](https://discourse.cmake.org/t/automatically-detecting-generated-dependencies/1183/7 "2020-11-09T20:07:33Z")

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I saw a topic reference this one and I thought I’d suggest some functionality for CMake that would be useful. We couldn’t go with CMake largely because of this problem and instead went with an in-house solution. We can declare virtual header files that the dependency scanner is aware of. These files are not guaranteed to exist during scanning and are not scanned themselves; nonetheless, the proper dependency is made between the source file and the various generated headers. It would be nice if CMake had such a capability for its dependency scanner.

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