Develop Reference

Most sensitive findbugs options in ant

I am running find bugs in ant and am trying to set everything (attributes, options, etc) in my ant build.xml to the most sensitive settings for finding bugs. From reading the documentation and looking at example here is what I concluded will be the most sensitive settings for if a bug is ran into. If it is not please let me know any attribute, options, etc that needed to be added or changed to find all the bugs that may be in my code.
<target name="findbugs" depends="jar">
<findbugs home="/home/me/Desktop/findbugs"
output="html"
outputFile="bc.html"
effort="max"
reportLevel="low"
workHard="true"
debug="true">
<auxClasspath path="../foo/bin"/>
<auxClasspath path="../bar/bin"/>
<sourcePath path="../foo2/src" />
<class location="bin/"/>
</findbugs>
</target>

No need for workHard="true" since you already have effort='max'. They're just synonyms of each other. Otherwise, it looks like you have it.
There are includeFilter and excludeFilter, but if you don't list either of those, you get all bugs.

Troubleshooting "failed to create task or type foreach" when using <foreach>

I'm trying to use the foreach loop in an Ant script but I get the message: Problem: failed to create task or type foreach Cause: The name is undefined.
I don't understand why this doesn't work. It is not a 3rd party library. It is a standard task that would be part of the latest version of Ant (1.8).
<target name="parse">
<echo message="The first five letters of the alphabet are:"/>
<foreach param="instance" list="a,b,c,d,e">
</foreach>
</target>

It is a standard task that would be
part of the latest version of Ant
(1.8).
No, it's not. At least I can't find it in the list of core and optional tasks in the ant manual.
It seems to be part of the ant-contrib project and thus needs to be installed separately.

I had the same issue under eclipse with various versions of ant.
Add this into your code WITHOUT adding parameters under eclipse (do not specify any classpath) :
<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties" classpath="/path/to/ant-contrib/ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar"/>

have you ever considered <script>? in this tag you can use some famous script language like javascript and python. they can also interact with the Project, Task... Object of Ant, which means you can set/get the properties and even excute another task. look at this example which comes from the book "java development with ant"
<project name="script_example" default="test-random">
<description>
Use a script task to generate a random number, then
print it
</description>
<target name="random">
<script language="javascript"><![CDATA[
//NB: an unqualified Math is the JavaScript object
var r=java.lang.Math.random();
var num = Math.round(r*10);
project.setNewProperty("random", num);
self.log("Generated random number " + num, project.MSG_DEBUG);
]]>
</script>
</target>
<target name="test-random" depends="random">
<echo>Random number is ${random}</echo>
</target>
</project>

I can't find the foreach task in the Ant 1.8 manual - where is it? I only know the task from ant-contrib, and it requires to specify the 'target' attribute: http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/tasks/tasks/foreach.html

You haven't defined a target to call:
<foreach param="instance" list="a,b,c,d,e" target="processListItem" />
alternatively:
<for param="instance" list="a,b,c,d,e" >
<sequential>
<!-- Do Something with #{instance} -->
</sequential>
</for>

Run some or all sections of an ant file

Is there a way to specify an ANT file to run only one/some/all of its sections?

Split your build into appropriate targets so that you can call individual targets separately, and then you can specify the target you want to run from the command line.
Personally I like having "real" targets without any dependencies (which I can run independently) and then "fake" targets which are just dependent on the real ones, for convenience (e.g. "clean-build"). The alternative of having test depend on compile etc always ends up getting in the way for me :(

You can group targets together using dependencies:
<target name="A">
<target name="B">
<target name="C" depends="A,B">
runs
A, B, then C.
You can also chain these to arbitrary depth. For example you could create an empty target "D" that depends on A, B which will only run A and B.

<project....
<target name="all">
...
</target>
<target name="some">
...
</target>
</project>
run
ant all
or
ant some

Define appropriate targets in your build file and then run
ant 'target name'
to run that particular one. You will have to configure target dependencies such that the ones you want to run separately can do so correctly.
It's a good practise to define these top-level targets with a description.
<target name="clean" description="Cleans up built artifacts">
Then you can run
ant -projecthelp
and this will display the targets with descriptions, thus telling you what targets are available. This will make life a lot easier further down the road, when you've forgotten what targets you've defined.

Is it possible to exclude some targets from Ant targets while executing the script?

In ant if want to execute more than one target, we can do it like this,
ant target1 target2 target3
Other way could be, create target4 like
<target name="target4" depends="target1,target2,target3" />
but the problem is, one of my target definition is:
<target name="buildApp" depends="init,copy-all-requiredfiles-local,wait-to-merge,compile,createWAR,deployAll"/>
and if i want to execute buildApp then it will run all associated targets too, as obvious.
Is it possible to execute the buildApp target without executing deployAll target?

A possibility would be add a condition to your deployAll target like this.
<target name="depolyAll" unless="doNotDeploy">
...
</target>
Then when you want to run buildApp without deployAll on the commandline just do
ant -DdoNotDeploy=true buildAll
btw. note that unless just checks if the property is set. Not what the value is.
But this behaviour should be documented and is a little obscure.
I would consider explicitly creating a second build target e.g. buildAllWithoutDeploy which just misses the deploy target

Why not create another target for it?
<target name="buildAppNoDeploy" depends="init,copy-all-requiredfiles-local,wait-to-merge,compile,createWAR"/>

When using ANT, how can I define a task only if I have some specific java version?

I have the problem that an specific step in Ant can only be executed when we have Java 1.5 installed in the build computer. The task definition uses uses a jar file that was compiled using 1.5, so running with a 1.4 virtual machine will throw an IncompatibleClassVersion exception.
I have to find a solution meanwhile to have this task working for this specific project that requires 1.4, but a question came to me. How can I avoid defining this task and executing this optional step if I don't have a specific java version?
I could use the "if" or "unless" tags on the target tag, but those only check if a property is set or not. I also would like to have a solution that doesn't require extra libraries, but I don't know if the build-in functionality in standard is enough to perform such a task.

The Java version is exposed via the ant.java.version property. Use a condition to set a property and execute the task only if it is true.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="project" default="default">
<target name="default" depends="javaCheck" if="isJava6">
<echo message="Hello, World!" />
</target>
<target name="javaCheck">
<echo message="ant.java.version=${ant.java.version}" />
<condition property="isJava6">
<equals arg1="${ant.java.version}" arg2="1.6" />
</condition>
</target>
</project>

The property to check in the buildfile is ${ant.java.version}.
You could use the <condition> element to make a task conditional when a property equals a certain value:
<condition property="legal-java">
<matches pattern="1.[56].*" string="${ant.java.version}"/>
</condition>