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Language: XML

July 19, 2004

Generate a Graph of Your Ant File Targets with Vizant

When you're dealing with huge Ant files, it can be difficult to follow targets and their dependencies. Luckily, there's a tool called Vizant that can generate a graph of your Ant file targets. You simply specify the name of your Ant file, and voila—Vizant generates the graph for you.

Here is an example of a Vizant file:

<project name="vizfile" default="main">
<taskdef name="vizant" classname="net.sourceforge.vizant.Vizant" classpath="C:/Java/vizant-
0.1.1/vizant.jar"/>
<target name="main">
<vizant antfile="./build.xml" outfile="build.dot">
<attrstmt type="graph"> <!-- make graph larger -->
<attr name="ranksep" value="1.2"/>
<attr name="nodesep" value="0.5"/>
</attrstmt>
</vizant>	
<exec executable="dot" ><arg line="-Tjpg build.dot -o build.jpg"/></exec>
</target> 
</project>

Assume your Ant build file is build.xml in the same path as this file. The above file defines a task called vizant, that is loaded from the specified class in the vizant.jar file. This file is run by executing the target main which generates the graph in build.jpg.