Re: [platform-ant-dev] How to use Ant functionality in recent builds?

[Jared Burns <jared-eclipse@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Max.

We'd like to provide this feature, we can't have the "Run Ant" action appear 
on the context menu all of the time. The context menus in resource navigator 
views are already heavily populated and we can't afford to clutter them with 
actions that aren't universally interesting. If we provide this action, we'd 
probably have to hide them by default but let you turn them on in the 
preferences.

That said, we gave this some thought yesterday and we came up with something 
like the following:
1. Provide a "Run Ant" action which runs Ant without ever bringing up the 
launch config dialog. If you choose this action on an XML file, the action 
will try to find a launch config. If it can't, it will create one. Then it 
will run the config.
2. Provide a "Run Ant..." action which always brings up the launch 
configuration dialog on the found or newly created config.
3. Provide the option to "Always show 'Run Ant' actions". With this option 
enabled, the above dialogs will appear on all resources, not just XML files. 
With this option enabled, the Run Ant actions will behave as usual for XML 
files. For non-XML files, the action will prompt the user to enter a search 
string (defaulting to "build.xml" and then to the last string entered) and 
will then search through the hierarchy for a file matching the string. Once a 
match is found, the action will behave as usual.
4. Provide a preference to "Build files to search for: " that can be set once 
the "Always show 'Run Ant' actions" preference is enabled. This preference 
would allow you to enter a series of search strings for the "Run Ant" actions 
to use. If a value is entered here, the actions won't prompt for a search 
string when run.

How does that sound?

- Jared

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 12:03 am, Max Rydahl Andersen wrote:
> How about adding a Run Ant to every kind of file/dir resource in eclipse ?
>
> If nothing is found on the file/dir resource eclipse searches for the
> nearest ant file (from current dirs and upwards) and uses that for
> launching ant........that would provide a very flexibile mechanism for
> invoking ant from anywhere without worrying about the exact location of the
> build.file (e.g. hence support -find directly)
>
> Just an idea :)
>
> /max