I’m working on a build file for the Model-Glue project and want to make it as user friendly as possible. Turns out this is very easy in Ant!
First always include a description in your build file – you can be a bit more verbose, I kept this short for the example:
<description> Ant script to create new Model-Glue 3.0 application. </description>
Of course if anyone edits your build file they will see the description, but we can also display this when the build file is first run. First I make my default target ‘help’:
<project name="Model-Glue" default="help" basedir=".">
Then create a ‘help’ target:
<target name="HELP" description="Displays a list of help to the user.">
<java fork="no" classname="org.apache.tools.ant.Main">
<classpath>
<fileset dir="${ant.home}\lib">
<include name="**/*.jar" />
</fileset>
</classpath>
<arg line="-projecthelp" />
</java>
</target>
This is simply running the exec task and running Ant with the ‘-p’ switch (which is short for ‘-projecthelp’ which simply prints a list of the build files targets as well as the description. In all our other targets we’ll make sure to include a ‘description’:
<target name="build" description="Copy Model-Glue files to new project directory."> <echo message="Copy Model-Glue!"/> </target>
Now if we run our build file we’ll see something like the following output (either at the command line or in the Eclipse console:
D:\>ant Buildfile: build.xml help: [exec] Buildfile: build.xml [exec] [exec] Ant script to create new Model-Glue 3.0 application [exec] [exec] Main targets: [exec] [exec] build Copy Model-Glue files to new project directory. [exec] help Displays a list of help to the user. [exec] Default target: help
Now the user can easily determine the purpose of the build file and see a list of possible targets to run.
Possibly Related:
The Making Your Build Files User Friendly by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
