Scratching my head over Eclipse / Ant build issue

[Terry Chambers]

Hi - I'm having trouble with my Eclipse 3.3 IDE.

I have an ANT build file that is very simple yet it is not working.

<project name="MyCode">
	<target name="build">
		<delete dir="build" />
		<delete dir="release" />
		<mkdir dir="release" />
		<mkdir dir="build/transform/WEB-INF/classes" />
		<javac srcdir='src' destdir='bin' />
		<copy todir="build/transform/WEB-INF/classes">
			<fileset dir="bin"/>
		</copy>
		<copy toDir="build/transform/xsl">
			<fileset dir="xsl"/>
		</copy>
		<war destfile="release/transform.war" webxml="config/web.xml" basedir="build/transform"/>
	</target>
</project>

When I run the build using RUN AS/ANT BUILD, the process says the BUILD was successful but directories, in the project, are not deleted not created. It is as if nothing is actually happening but there are no errors.

I am using Vista and my Eclipse Workspace directory is under my user directory.

I have searched the entire computer for the WAR file to see if maybe it is creating it somewhere else but it is not found.

I have no idea what is going on. Any thoughts?

Thanks
Terry

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Terry,
What other output is the build giving? Does it say it compiled for example?

You might try adding

  <echo>made it to here</echo>  

after the war task to make sure Eclipse is completing execution. I've noticed a few errors just result in the build stopping in Eclipse.

You could also try adding the verbose attribute to the copy task for more info as to what is going on. (or the -v flag to ant itself)

[Rob Spoor]

Moving to our Ant forum.

[Peter Johnson]

Have you tried running the build from the command line? Sometimes Eclipse does strange things when running ant build scripts.

[Terry Chambers]

I went to a Command prompt and into the directory where the build.xml is and just typed "ant". I received back "BUILD Successful" with a time of 0 seconds. Nothing was created or deleted.

Should I uninstall Eclipse and reinstall it?

[Mark E Hansen]

Do you need to provide a default attribute to the project tag?

<project name="MyCode" default="build">

[Terry Chambers]

Do you need to provide a default attribute to the project tag?

Yes! That was all that was missing.

Thanks!

[Peter Johnson]

just typed "ant"

You should have typed:

ant build