Categories: Ant

Creating targets and their dependencies in ANT build file

A target is a collection of tasks that you want to run as one unit. Targets can have dependencies on other targets. When you create a new Ant buildfile project builder, the default target is set to be run for After a “Clean” and Manual Build and the remaining two kinds; Auto Build and During a “Clean” are set to not be executed. If you want to configure your builder to execute specific targets from your buildfile for specific build kinds then more understanding of what the build kinds are, and more importantly, when they will be executed is required.

We can create target and their dependencies as below in the application build file.

Creating simple Target without dependency

<?xml version="1.0"?>
   <project name="Hello World" default="info" basedir=".">
   
   <target name="info">
      <echo>Hello World - Welcome to Apache Ant Tutorial!!!</echo>
   </target>
   
</project>

 Attributes of target

 

  • name-> The name of the target ant it is mandatory.
  • depends-> Comma separated list of all targets that this target depends on and it is optional.
  • description->A short description of the target and it is optional.
  • if->Allows the execution of a target based on the trueness of a conditional attribute and it is optional.
  • unless->Adds the target to the dependency list of the specified Extension Point. An Extension Point is similar to a target, but it does not have any tasks and it is optional.

Creating multiple Targets with dependencies

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="AlgoTest.makejar" default="makejar" basedir=".">
  <property name="build.dir" value="build" />
  <target name="clean" description="cleans up the build by deleting the build,dist, web directories">
     <delete dir="${build.dir}"/>
   </target>
   <target name="init" depends="clean" description="Setup for build script">   
     <mkdir dir="${build.dir}"/>
   </target>
   <target name="compile" depends="init" description="Compiles .java files to WAR directory">
       <javac srcdir="src" destdir="bin" debug="true"   
            depend="true" includeantruntime="true">
       </javac>
     </target>    
      <target name ="makejar" description="Create a jar for the AlgoTest project" depends="compile">
     <jar jarfile="${build.dir}/AlgoTest.jar" includes="*.class" basedir="bin">
      <manifest>
        <attribute name = "Main-Class" value = "com.dineshonjava.algo.StringPermutation"/>
     </manifest>
     </jar>
   </target>
</project>

As per as we have define targets in the above file have dependencies such as a makejar target may have a dependency on the compile target and compile target may have dependency on the init target and init target may have dependency on the clean target.

 

 

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Dinesh Rajput

Dinesh Rajput is the chief editor of a website Dineshonjava, a technical blog dedicated to the Spring and Java technologies. It has a series of articles related to Java technologies. Dinesh has been a Spring enthusiast since 2008 and is a Pivotal Certified Spring Professional, an author of a book Spring 5 Design Pattern, and a blogger. He has more than 10 years of experience with different aspects of Spring and Java design and development. His core expertise lies in the latest version of Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Security, creating REST APIs, Microservice Architecture, Reactive Pattern, Spring AOP, Design Patterns, Struts, Hibernate, Web Services, Spring Batch, Cassandra, MongoDB, and Web Application Design and Architecture. He is currently working as a technology manager at a leading product and web development company. He worked as a developer and tech lead at the Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and was the first developer in his previous company, Paytm. Dinesh is passionate about the latest Java technologies and loves to write technical blogs related to it. He is a very active member of the Java and Spring community on different forums. When it comes to the Spring Framework and Java, Dinesh tops the list!

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