Ant build target to list own build targets - ant

Question

I am brand new to Ant. I would like to have the following:
<target name="targets" description "Lists Targets">
[some Ant code/tasks]
</target
When I call ant targets I want Ant to search the current file that Ant is running for all it's targets
<target name="all" depends="doc,sca,compile,test" description="Complete build">
</target>
And output
[echo] all - Complete Build - Depends on: doc, sca, compile, test
[echo] doc - Builds documentation
[echo] compile - Compiles files
[echo] sca - Performs static code analysis
[echo] test - Runs unit tests - Depends on: compile
[echo] clean - Cleans a build
[echo] install - Performs an installation
[echo] targets - Lists Targets
In Bash or Make I'd just do a grep regular expression. The following, in Make, lists the make targets:
noop: ;
targets:
#$(MAKE) --print-data-base --question noop | \
grep -v "[A-Z]:/" | \
awk '/^[Mm]akefile:/ { next } \
/^targets:/ { next } \
/^noop:/ { next } \
/^[^.%!][-A-Za-z0-9_]*:/ { print substr($$1, 1, length($$1)-1) }' | \
sort | \
pr --omit-pagination --width=80 --columns=4
Output:
[matt#office burning-boots-website]$ make -C ~/workspace/packages/ targets
all diagnose install vca_core
clean doc platforms vca_counting_line
compile help utils vca_rules
It would be nice to have something simliar in my Ant build script! would be especially nice if Ant could do the nice alignment that pr does - or even colour the output! Can Ant do cross platform terminal colour changes?

Answer 1

You could just use ant -p (or ant -p -v to get more information). This won't list the target dependencies, but I don't see it as a problem: dependencies are not important for the end user (they just tell how the target works). What's important is what the target does, which is what should be in its description.