What I meant was something in-between. I do have an empty "ant-test" target to look for property XML typos, etc. However, I noticed the change in 1.2 that allowed typos to exist if I didn't call the target. So, what I want is an ant command-line argument to do the build.xml XML-syntax check. Whether it's a good Ant file or not, I don't care. just want to make sure all tags are closed, etc. Maybes there's a class in the JAXP that can do that. I'll research more.
Jesse -----Original Message----- From: Stefan Bodewig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, October 20, 2000 8:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: enhancement ideas: worthwhile? >>>>> "KB" == KC Baltz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> I would like ant to have a command-line argument to simply syntax >> check the build.xml file(s). KB> I'm guessing you could get this behavior by declaring a task that KB> does nothing and then building it. KB> <task name="checkXML"> </task> KB> ant checkXML This will ensure your XML file is well formed, but not that it is a valid Ant build file. Starting with Ant 1.2alpha3 Ant will ignore unknown tags inside a <target> until you finally try to execute the corresponding task - so you won't find a typo in the name of a task unless you really use it. Similarly you won't find a typo in an attribute's name until it gets configured - which also only happens if you execute the task starting with 1.2alpha2. It really gets even more complicated. If you create a directory with mkdir and later point a fileset to it, this is perfectly valid for Ant. A "dry run" like make -n would not really create the directory and then FileSet.setDir would throw an Exception. Stefan
