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 & subtargets 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 > Other... > Ant > Ant.
- By default, the Ant view is empty. There are two ways to add Ant buildfiles to
this view:
- Click the 'Add Buildfile' button. This brings up a dialog in which
you explicitly select those Ant buildfiles you want to add
- Click the 'Add Buildfiles with Search' button. 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 the Add Buildfiles with Search button. 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 subtarget
World.
- Select the World subtarget and click the Play button. Notice that just the
World subtarget gets executed.
- Select the top-level HelloWorld buildfile and click Play. 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. Note that the choice and order of targets is ignored
when running from the Ant view. If the top-level file is selected, just the
default target is run and if one of the targets or subtargets is selected,
just that target is run. It is not possible to run multiple targets from the
Ant view.
- Select the HelloWorld file, then click the Remove button. The buildfile is
removed from the view. Note that this does not delete the file from the workspace.