deviate from the truth – think different

Have you ever written an Eclipse Plug-In that has to call an Ant-Script? OK, I’m sure you get this done. Maybe then you’ve ask yourself (or someone else ): “How do I get the Ant output into the console of Eclipse?” So, I have and also was asked.

My spontaneous and innocent answer: “Just call ‘addBuildLogger’ on your AntRunner.”

The Logger has to look like that:

public class EclipseAntLogger extends DefaultLogger {

private IOConsole console = new IOConsole("Ant", null);
private IOConsoleOutputStream outputStream = console.newOutputStream();

public EclipseAntLogger() {
 ConsolePlugin.getDefault().getConsoleManager().addConsoles(new IConsole[] { console });
}

@Override
protected void printMessage(String message, PrintStream stream, int priority) {
 super.printMessage(message, stream, priority);
 try {
  outputStream.write(message + "\n");
 } catch (IOException e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
 }
}

The problem I’ve got with that was a ClassNotFound exception of my logger class. Of course! My AntRunner uses a different VM and with that a totally different ClassPath than the one of Eclipse.

How to put your logger class onto the AntRunner ClassPath?
-> Setup the custom classpath of the AntRunner.

// get the default custom classpath from the preferences
AntCorePreferences corePreferences = AntCorePlugin.getPlugin().getPreferences();
URL[] urls = corePreferences.getURLs();

// get the location of the plugin jar
File bundleFile = FileLocator.getBundleFile(myPlugin.getBundle());
URL url = bundleFile.toURI().toURL();

// bond urls to complete classpath
List<URL> classpath = new ArrayList<URL>();
classpath.addAll(Arrays.asList(urls));
classpath.add(url);

// set custom classpath
antRunner.setCustomClasspath(classpath.toArray(new URL[classpath.size()]));

Not too nice in my opinion. Another possibility is to use an extension.

<extension point="org.eclipse.ant.core.extraClasspathEntries">
 <extraClasspathEntry library="ant/logger.jar">
 </extraClasspathEntry>
</extension>

You have to put the logger class into another jar and add it to the extra classpath of the eclipse ant classpath.

Better! But I wasn’t almost happy with this solution.
After some days of work there was the flash of genius – or something like that

You know the laucher from the Eclipse-UI where you can create a new ‘External Tools Configurations…’?

In your code you have to use ‘ILaunchConfigurationType’ to create a new configuration. My solution looks like this:

ILaunchManager launchManager = DebugPlugin.getDefault().getLaunchManager();
ILaunchConfigurationType lcType = launchManager.getLaunchConfigurationType(IAntLaunchConstants.ID_ANT_LAUNCH_CONFIGURATION_TYPE);

String name = launchManager.generateLaunchConfigurationName("Run Ant");
ILaunchConfigurationWorkingCopy wc = lcType.newInstance(null, name);
wc.setAttribute(ILaunchManager.ATTR_PRIVATE, true);
wc.setAttribute(IExternalToolConstants.ATTR_LOCATION, buildFile.toString());
wc.setAttribute(IAntLaunchConstants.ATTR_ANT_TARGETS, "run");

wc.launch(ILaunchManager.RUN_MODE, null);

It’s based on the new API that will be introduced with Eclipse 3.6 and requires at least these bundles:

• org.eclipse.debug.core
• org.eclipse.ant.launching
• org.eclipse.core.externaltools

It works beautiful I think? So what do you?

Do you have another suggestion how to solve the problem? Let me know.

be happy until cancelled,
Your Codescale’s