Using the Ant view
Eclipse provides a standard view, the Ant view, that lets you
work with your Ant buildfiles. This view is tree-structured, showing Ant buildfiles
as top-level entries and targets & internal targets as children. The main advantage
of this view is that you can work with all of your Ant buildfiles in one place,
as opposed to hunting them down in the Navigator.
- Open the Ant view from the workbench menu by selecting Window > Show
View > Ant.
- By default, the Ant view is empty. There are two ways to add Ant buildfiles
to this view:
- Click Add Buildfile
.
This brings up a dialog in which you explicitly select those Ant buildfiles
you want to add
- Click Add Buildfiles with Search
.
This brings up a search dialog in which you can specify a filename pattern
for your Ant buildfiles and search within the entire workspace or a specified
working set.
Once added to the Ant view, Ant buildfile entries remain in the view across
workbench invocations until explicitly removed.
- Click Add Buildfiles with Search. Suppose you only remember
that the buildfile you want to work with starts with 'H'. Enter 'H*.xml' for
the buildfile name. Make sure Workspace is selected for the scope, then click
Search. The HelloWorld.xml file is found and placed in the Ant view.
- Expand the top-level entry to see the default target Hello, and the internal
target World.
- Select the World internal target and click Run the Default Target
of the Selected Buildfile
.
Notice that just the World target gets executed.
- Select the top-level HelloWorld buildfile and click Run the Default
Target of the Selected Buildfile. Notice that just the default target,
Hello, gets executed.
- To edit your buildfile, bring up the context menu on the HelloWorld file
and select Open With > Ant Editor.
- To edit the default launch configuration, select Properties... from
the context menu.
- The Run Ant dialog appears. Here you can modify the way in which the buildfile
is run from the Ant view. If the top-level file is selected, just the default
target is run and if one of the targets or internal targets is selected, just
that target is run. It is not possible to run multiple targets from the Ant
view.
Note: The choice and order of targets is ignored when running from
the Ant view.
- Select the HelloWorld file, then click the Remove button. The buildfile
is removed from the view.
Note: This does not delete the file from the workspace.