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Building Forrest within Eclipse

Audience

Persons who wish to invoke Apache- Forrest's Ant tasks from Eclipse".

Purpose

To run, within Eclipse, Ant builds that include Forrest tasks.

Prerequisites

  • Forrest v. 0.7.0, downloaded from the CVS repository /usr/local/cvsrep/third-party/apache
  • Environment variable FORREST_HOME set to the root of the Forrest installation (for 0.7; for 0.6 it was the /src/core directory within Forrest), per Forrest upgrade docs.
  • Configure Oxygen to find Forrest's DTDs [this is not, strictly speaking, a prerequisite, but it is a mighty convenience]

Running Forrest Builds from Eclipse

Warning

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This document has been superceded!

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This document is no longer maintained at this location. It has been superceded by a more up-to-date document on the IST-ASAG site.

The new URL for this document is: http://ist.berkeley.edu/as/ag/tools/howto/forrest-eclipse.html

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Calling Forrest's Ant tasks from within Eclipse requires some initial set-up, and proper calling syntax. Forrest's description of invocation from Ant is here; however, the simple descriptions below might prove more useful.

Add catalog entity resolver to Ant runtime classpath

In Eclipse, the Ant runtime classpath can be set from navigating to Ant : Runtime in the Preferences dialog.

Under Global Entries in the Classpath pane, add the JAR file forrest/lib/core/xml-commons-resolver-1.1.jar (i.e., the jar file xml-commons-resolver-1.1.jar located in the /lib/core directory of your Forrest installation).

Invoke Forrest targets from Ant

The following is an example of a target that invokes Forrest from within Ant. This invocation will run from within Eclipse.


<target name="forrest-site" description="Generates static HTML documentation">
  <ant antfile="${forrest.home}/forrest.build.xml" target="site"/>
</target>

Plugin-download errors

In Forrest's documentation on running builds within Ant, there is a warning regarding a but in the plugin downloader. If this error occurs, two options may resolve it:

  • specify the plugin version number in forrest.properties, as described in the documentation
  • the first time you run Forrest on the tree, run it from the command line, e.g., forrest site (where $FORREST_HOME/bin is on the path)