We store various design documents within TFS in multimarkdown format. We also have an EXE process that can run to take those MMD files and generate PDF's from them - but just by getting the files from a local folder.
What we'd like to do is to have a process run "on-checkin", just as if you'd run an automatic build on checkin (i.e., ultimately calling msbuild to compile an application) but in our case we'd like it to be able to get a list of the checked in files and to process and generate an output of them. The result doesn't need to be in TFS because they're a build output, not the source.
I'm sure this should be somehow possible by taking the same approach as must be taken by the workflow for a "normal" build.
Has anybody done anything like this or can point me in a suitable direction please ?
You could use the exec task in MSBuild to invoke the exe and "build" your output. Create a file called something like buildDocs.proj and check it in to TFS possibly in a folder under the things you want to build. Use the MSbuild below as a guide.
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
<Target Name="Build">
<Exec Command='"My.exe" -My Paramiters' />
<ItemGroup>
<CopyItems Include="[path to output]\*.*" />
</ItemGroup>
<Copy SourceFiles="#(CopyItems)" DestinationFolder="$(OutDir)\SomeDir" />
</Target>
</Project>
The trick will be in identifying the various paths involved.
Use the default template to build the proj, just as you would a c# project. If you need to pass in additional Parameters to MSBuild you can do this from within the advanced section of the build definition process tab.
Am using ant to build my RCP application. The PDE headless build works well. However for some custom bundling of my artifacts, i need to access the timestamp that PDE uses while creating jars of my plugins and features.
Ex: com.test.app.1.0.0.201404091703.jar
I need to get the value 201404091703 from the PDE once the build is successful. Is this possible?
I tried with forceContextQualifier from the build.properties, but the problem with this is, everytime before the build starts i need to update this value manually (to some static value) and overriding of this global property (dynamically) using ANT is not possible.
Any suggestions is appreciated
You can specify -DforceContextQualifier=xxx as an argument to the org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_xxx run in your build.xml.
Update:
So, for example:
<buildnumber file="build.number"/>
<tstamp>
<format property="build.date" pattern="yyyyMMddHHmm" timezone="GMT"/>
</tstamp>
<property name="build.version" value="${build.date}-${build.number}"/>
<java fork="true" jar="${jar.launcher}">
<arg value="-DforceContextQualifier=${build.version}"/>
...
Sets the qualifier for a build to YYYYMMDDHHMM-num
The PDE headless build generates property files for each bundle with the current version numbers. In a custom callback (or else in your Ant build file) you can read such a property file and use the properties.
Search for the property generateVersionsLists in Eclipse Help.
http://help.eclipse.org/luna/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.pde.doc.user%2Ftasks%2Fpde_version_qualifiers.htm
I'm using a #Grab annotation to grab the definition of an Html parser I can give to the XMLSlurper (I think it's the tagsoup parser) and all is good when I run my script from the cmd line. If I invoke the same script from Ant I get an Ivy NoClassDefFound error. I think it may berelated to having Ivy in Antlib. Is there another way to parse Html without customizing the slurper via #Grab?
This:
#Grab(group='org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup', module='tagsoup', version='1.2' )
doc = new XmlSlurper(new org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Parser()).parse(confluenceWebPageInputStream)
Works just fine from the command line but when I run it from an Ant build target:
<target name="update-wiki-chart">
<echo message="Will update chart for version ${version}"/>
<java dir="${basedir}" classname="groovy.lang.GroovyShell">
<arg value="ParseWikiPage.groovy"/>
<classpath refid="groovylib"/>
</java>
</target>
where groovyLib is a path ref pointing to the Groovy-1.8.6 jar downloaded from our internal Nexus repo, I get the NoClassDefFound error. I'm thinking this is probably due to having Ivy installed in Antlib causing the class loader to find it in two places. I just thought of something while writing this post. I can probably run java in forked mode or do something to cause it to not see/share Ant's classpath.It's been a few years since I've wrestled w/ Ant and class loader issues. My project is a little delinquent due to the bug and I'm looking for a quick/easy fix.
I just tried running my groovy on the cmd line via the "java" cmd and loading groovy-all jar in the class path and I realized that I get the NoClassDefFound error there as well. It has nothing to do with collisions with Ivy under Antlib. Rather, I am missing Ivy altogether. I had assumed it was included in Groovy-all.jar. I just need a clever way of passing Ivy from AntLib into my java task to get this all up and running.
Sounds like you're missing one or more jars from the classpath. I'd suggest digging around the classpathref you've labelled "groovylib".
A less error prone way to launch groovy from within ANT using the groovy ANT task.
Here's a similar example to your use-case:
Parse HTML using with an Ant Script
My example uses ivy directly to manage all build dependencies. The Grab annotations are still supported but obviously these would only manage the dependencies of the groovy script.
I am trying to build subprojects from my main Ant build script..
The build files are located in
plugings/<pluginName>/build.xml
I want to do something effectively like
<ant antfile="plugins/*/build.xml" ...>
It should dynamically find build files in the plugin directory. Haven't been able to get it to work yet with filesets.. any tips?
Thanks in advance.
Solution: <subant> was the task I was looking for
These links show you a way of building sub-projects:
Sample Ant build file for multiple projects
Ant Tip 1: Write a master build file
Check this answer:
Generate Ant build file
I want to use the FTP task in ant, and I have found the appropriate jar files and got everything working fine. I have put the jar files in a "libs" directory alongside the other files used in the build. The only problem is that the user must run "ant -lib commons-net-ftp-2.0.jar" to make a build; I would really prefer that it were possible to just run "ant" with no arguments.
Reading the ant optional tasks intallation page, I see that there are five ways one can load up extra libraries in ant, and none of them are really what I'm looking for. I do not want to force the user to make any modifications to their system to run this task; it should be possible to just load it from the "libs" directory inside of our product's source folder. So that means setting the global CLASSPATH is also out (which is a bad idea anyways).
The last option, as noted in the documentation, is the preferred approach... loading the jarfiles individually from the build script itself. I have done this in the past with the ant-contrib tasks and JUnit, and would like to do that here, but I don't see how I can accomplish this. The FTP task doesn't support a nested classpath element, and I don't know the XML resource I would need to load this library via a taskdef. How can I load the libraries from within ant?
Edit: In response to the answers and questions which have been posted here so far, I'm using ant 1.7.1. Making an ftp taskdef definitely does not work; that throws the following error:
BUILD FAILED
/my/path/build.xml:13: taskdef class org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP cannot be found
Perhaps this is because the classname is wrong. How exactly do I find the classname I'm supposed to use if I only have a jarfile? It's not documented anywhere, and I couldn't find anything in the jar itself resembling that path.
The problem you are having is due to the different class-loaders in use. The Commons Net classes must be loaded by the same class-loader that loads the FTP task. Because the FTP task is loaded by Ant on start-up, you need to add the Commons Net to Ant's classpath so that it is loaded by the same class-loader. That's why the documentation gives you 4 different ways to do this.
I agree that none of them are ideal (the CLASSPATH environment variable being the worst). One way around this is to supply a shell script with your project that invokes Ant and passes the apporpriate -lib argument. You then get people to use this rather than invoking Ant directly. In fact, you could deviously name it 'ant' so that it gets run instead of the existing 'ant' on the path (this only works if the current directory is on the path, ahead of other directories).
The fifth option in the documentation is great in theory. They finally fixed the class-loading problems in 1.7.0. Unfortunately, as you mention, nobody retro-fitted the FTP task to take a classpath. You could try submitting an enhancement request, but this won't help in the short term.
There is one other option, which isn't any better than the others. Instead of making sure that the Commons Net classes are loaded by the class-loader that loads the FTP task, you could make sure that the FTP task is loaded by the class-loader that loads the Commons Net classes. To do this you have to remove the ant-commons-lib.jar file from the 'lib' directory of the Ant installation. This means that the FTP task won't get loaded on start-up. This is actually why the optional tasks are broken up into so many separate JARs - so that they can be individually removed. Put this JAR file alongside the Commons Net JAR file so that it can be loaded at the same time. Then you can do something like this (I tried this and it works):
<taskdef name="ftp"
classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP">
<classpath>
<pathelement location="${basedir}/lib/ant-commons-net.jar"/>
<pathelement location="${basedir}/lib/commons-net-2.0.jar"/>
</classpath>
</taskdef>
<ftp server="yourserver.com"
userid="anonymous"
password="blah">
<fileset dir="somedirectory"/>
</ftp>
But this is probably a worse option than just using the -lib switch (with or without a wrapper script). The only other thing I can think of is to try to find a third-party FTP task to use instead of the default one.
I have a solution:
you can download a new "classloader" task from http://enitsys.sourceforge.net/ant-classloadertask/ and load it whith:
<taskdef resource="net/jtools/classloadertask/antlib.xml"
classpath="XXX/ant-classloadertask.jar"/>
Naw can do things like loading classes with the same classloader that ant use for his task:
<classloader loader="system" classpath="XXX/commons-net-2.0.jar"/>
or "loader="project""
Then you definde your task:
<taskdef name="ftp" classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP"/>
and go :-)
So I succeeded in doing this for the ant-salesforce.jar that you get when trying to do salesforce work (fun...)
Check to see if the jar has an xml file in it that looks something like this:
<antlib>
<typedef name="compileAndTest" classname="com.salesforce.ant.CompileAndTest"/>
....
</antlib>
Then in ant give it a taskdev that reads that file from inside the given jar, like this:
<taskdef resource="com/salesforce/antlib.xml" classpath="lib/ant-salesforce.jar" />
Hope that helps some.
Ah, man, this is just so nasty. I run ant from eclipse. I don't want to reconfigure ant in eclipse for new workspaces, so here's what I decided to do, to decouple running the task and configuring ant. I extracted the ftp task to a separate build file. Next I added a native call to the command line to start a completely new ant process with the required libraries on the path:
<target name="deploy-ftp">
<exec command="ant">
<arg line="-buildfile ftp.xml deploy-ftp -lib lib/ant"/>
</exec>
</target>
Now the master build file can be run without any special arguments and no modifications are required to the ant installation. It's nasty though, since the ftp task runs in a completely clean environment. None of the properties and paths from the master build file are available. Luckily I had all of these in a separate property file anyway, so I only needed a single import.
I would like to add a big thanks to Dan Dyer. Without your extensive explanation of what's going on behind the scenes, I wouldn't have found this solution.
Will this work assuming libs is directly under you project's base directory
<taskdef name="ftp" classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP">
<classpath>
<pathelement location="${basedir}\libs\commons-net-1.4.0.jar"/>
</classpath>
</taskdef>
Your users all have ant installed on their machines but you can't / don't want to make them add the FTP jar? Can you bundle ant with your project make tasks that call YOUR ant bundle, with the jars placed so it'll work as follows?
<taskdef name="ftp" classname="org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.net.FTP">
<classpath>
<pathelement location="\lib\commons-net-1.4.0.jar"/>
</classpath>
</taskdef>
<target name="testFtp">
<ftp server="blah" userid="foo" password="bar">
<fileset file="test.file" />
</ftp>
</target>