manual/Tasks/antstructure.html

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<title>AntStructure Task</title>
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<h2><a name="antstructure">AntStructure</a></h2>
<h3>Description</h3> 

<p>Generates an DTD for Apache Ant buildfiles which contains information
about all tasks currently known to Ant.</p>

<p>Actually the DTD will not be a real DTD for buildfiles since Ant's
usage of XML cannot be captured with a DTD.  Several elements in Ant
can have different attribute lists depending on the element that
contains them.  &quot;fail&quot; for example can be <a
href="fail.html">the task</a> or the nested child element of the <a
href="../Tasks/sound.html">sound</a> task.  Don't consider the
generated DTD something to rely upon.</p>

<p>Also note that the DTD generated by this task is incomplete, you can
always add XML entities using <a
href="taskdef.html"><code>&lt;taskdef&gt;</code></a> or <a
href="typedef.html"><code>&lt;typedef&gt;</code></a>. See <a
href="http://www.sdv.fr/pages/casa/html/ant-dtd.en.html"
target="_top">here</a> for a way to get around this problem.</p>
<p>This task doesn't know about required attributes, all will be
listed as <code>#IMPLIED</code>.</p>

<p><em>Since Ant 1.7</em> custom structure printers can be used
instead of the one that emits a DTD.  In order to plug in your own
structure, you have to implement the interface
<code>org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.AntStructure.StructurePrinter</code>
and <code>&lt;typedef&gt; your class and use the new type as a nested
element of this task - see the example below.</code>

<h3>Parameters</h3>
<table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td valign="top"><b>Attribute</b></td>
    <td valign="top"><b>Description</b></td>
    <td align="center" valign="top"><b>Required</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td valign="top">output</td>
    <td valign="top">file to write the DTD to.</td>
    <td valign="top" align="center">Yes</td>
  </tr>
</table>
<h3>Examples</h3>
<blockquote><pre>
&lt;antstructure output=&quot;project.dtd&quot; /&gt;
</pre></blockquote>

<p><b>Emitting your own structure instead of a DTD</b></p>

<p>First you need to implement the interface</p>

<pre>
package org.example;
import org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.AntStructure;
public class MyPrinter implements AntStructure.StructurePrinter {
    ...
}
</pre>

<p>and then use it via typedef</p>

<pre>
  &lt;typedef name="myprinter" classname="org.example.MyPrinter" /&gt;
  &lt;antstructure output="project.my"&gt;
    &lt;myprinter /&gt;
  &lt;/antstructure&gt;
</pre>

<p>Your own StructurePrinter can accept attributes and nested elements
just like any other Ant type or task.</p>

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