Robin's Tech Tips » ant http://robin.mytechtip.com Just another My Tech Tip weblog Wed, 06 Jul 2011 02:35:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Use Ant to Generate ChangeLogs From CVS ang Group by Date http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/09/02/use-ant-to-generate-changelogs-from-cvs-ang-group-by-date/ http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/09/02/use-ant-to-generate-changelogs-from-cvs-ang-group-by-date/#comments Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:58:44 +0000 robin http://robin.mytechtip.com/?p=43

Since version 1.6.1, Ant, the java build tool, has a core task called “cvschangelog“. It is quite useful to use this task to grab a list of recent changes committed to the CVS repository. The output of this task is in XML format. Something like the following:

<changelog>
<entry>
<date>2009-09-02</date>
<time>12:00</time>
<author>robin</author>
<file>
<name>test/ant/task/ChangeLog.txt</name>
<revision>1.2</revision>
<prevrevision>1.1</prevrevision>
</file>
<msg><![CDATA[A commit message]]></msg>
</entry>
<entry>
…
</entry>
…
</changelog>

To transform the xml formatted changelog into a human friendly html, you can do an XSL transformation with a XSL file. There is a default one in the Ant distribution, so you can use the following task to get a change log in html format.

<style in=”changelog.xml”
out=”changelog.html”
style=”${ant.home}/etc/changelog.xsl”>
<param name=”title” expression=”Ant ChangeLog”/>
<param name=”module” expression=”the_module”/>
<param name=”cvsweb” expression=”the_url”/>
</style>

The default generated html lists each commit change one by one. In some cases, we want to group the commit changes by dates. To do so, we have to change the default xsl file.

It seems that the new XSLT version 2.0 has specified a group functionality. However, it turns out only a few XSLT tools support this new feature. Fortunately, There is a way that allows us to do the grouping using XSLT version 1.0. By applying this method, we have the following looking xsl code for the HTML <BODY> part.

<body>
<h1>
<a name=”top”><xsl:value-of select=”$title”/></a>
</h1>
<p style=”text-align: right”>Designed for use with <a href=”http://ant.apache.org/”>Apache Ant</a>.</p>
<hr/>

<xsl:key name=”log-by-date” match=”entry” use=”date” />

<xsl:template match=”changelog”>
<xsl:for-each select=”entry[count(. | key('log-by-date', date)[1]) = 1]”>
<xsl:sort select=”date” order=”descending” />
<h2><xsl:value-of select=”date”/><xsl:text></xsl:text></h2>
<xsl:for-each select=”key(’log-by-date’, date)”>

<xsl:sort select=”time” order=”descending” />

<table border=”0″ width=”100%” cellspacing=”1″>
<tr>
<td class=”dateAndAuthor”>
<!– <xsl:value-of select=”date”/><xsl:text> </xsl:text> –>
<xsl:value-of select=”time”/><xsl:text> </xsl:text><xsl:value-of select=”author”/>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<pre><xsl:apply-templates select=”msg”/></pre>
<ul>
<xsl:apply-templates select=”file”/>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</body>

Use the above code to replace the <body> part in the original changelog.xsl file, then it  will allow you to group the change logs by date.

]]> http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/09/02/use-ant-to-generate-changelogs-from-cvs-ang-group-by-date/feed/ 0 Ant: how to list files that are copied/compiled http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/01/08/ant-how-to-list-files-copied/ http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/01/08/ant-how-to-list-files-copied/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:01:56 +0000 robin http://robin.mytechtip.com/2009/01/08/12/
Ant is a good tool to automate the project build / deploy process (especially for java projects). What’s more, it can also be an general tool used for file synchronization, backup and etc.

When i used ant to synchronize my folder in the desktop computer to my usb flash drive, i wanted to know what exact files have been copied over for synchronization. However, by default, ant only shows how many files have been copied over.

I tried adding option “–verbose” (or “-v”) to the ant command. But this option make the output too verbose to tell the copied files.

Finally, I found the solution. It’s actually very easy. In the “build.xml” file, for the “copy” task, just add the attribute “verbose” with the value “true”. For example:

<target name=”backup-download” description=”backup”>
<copy todir=”${todir}” verbose=”true”>
<fileset dir=”${download}” ></fileset>
</copy>
</target>

This “verbose” attribute is also available for the task “javac”, which means you can list java files that are actually compiled with this attribute turned on.

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