Section 9.3. Creating Ant Task DTDs

9.3. Creating Ant Task DTDs

The Ant documentation is useful but at times hard to use if you're looking for the definitions of nested tasks and elements, because they're not listed at the top level. On the other hand, if you can read a DTD and want to know how any Ant task or element is defined, use the antstructure task. This task will create a DTD for all Ant tasks that Ant knows about, including optional tasks, with their attributes and nested elements. This task only has one attribute, output, which specifies the output file to hold the DTD.

Example 9-4 shows how to use this task, storing the DTD for all Ant tasks in project.dtd.

Example 9-4. Using the antstructure task (ch09/antstructure/build.xml)

<?xml version="1.0" ?> <project default="main">     <target name="main">         <antstructure output="project.dtd"/>     </target>    </project>

Here's part of the DTD, project.dtd, generated:

<!ELEMENT project (target | %tasks; | %types;)*> <!ATTLIST project           name    CDATA #IMPLIED           default CDATA #IMPLIED           basedir CDATA #IMPLIED> <!ELEMENT target (%tasks; | %types;)*> <!ATTLIST target           id          ID    #IMPLIED           name        CDATA #REQUIRED           if          CDATA #IMPLIED           unless      CDATA #IMPLIED           depends     CDATA #IMPLIED           description CDATA #IMPLIED> <!ELEMENT patternset (include | patternset | exclude | excludesfile | includesfile)*> <!ATTLIST patternset           id ID #IMPLIED           includes CDATA #IMPLIED           refid IDREF #IMPLIED           description CDATA #IMPLIED           excludesfile CDATA #IMPLIED           includesfile CDATA #IMPLIED           excludes CDATA #IMPLIED>         .         .         .