All of the definition files have the same format. They're divided into sections with content specific to each section. A section always starts with a section name followed by a colon (':').

faultAction: restart
maxFileSystemBytes: 200K

Sections with content item lists always have curly braces around them.

sources:
{
    helloWorld.c
    object.cpp
}

All sections are optional; they can be empty or omitted.

Sections can be in any order, multiple occurrences are permitted, and some sections have sub-sections.

requires:
{
    file:
    {
        /dev/ttyS0  /dev/uart
    }
    file:
    {
        /tmp/foo  /tmp/
    }
    dir:
    {
    }
}

Tabs, spaces, new-lines, carriage-returns and comments act as token separators only, and are otherwise all ignored. Choice of indentation and spacing style is relatively unrestricted.

Comments

Comments can be included using

// C++-style one-line comments.
/* or
   C-style multi-line comments. */

Sample

/* Component.cdef file for a hypothetical web server component that provides a control API
 * (defined in httpdCtrl.api) that allows other apps to start and stop the web server via IPC.
 */
bundles:
{
    // Include all the web pages from the build host in the application, and have them appear
    // to the application under /var/www.
    dir:
    {
        htdocs   /var/www
    }
}
provides :     // Note that space is allowed between the section name and the colon.
{
    api:    {   httpdCtrl.api
            }
}
sources:{httpd.c}