----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian MacLean" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Gert Driesen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Nant-Developers (E-Mail)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 04, 2004 5:10 PM Subject: Re: [nant-dev] checking task availability
> Gert Driesen wrote: > > >After giving it some more thought, it might be best to have a bool property > >on Task that is non-virtual, and which never throws an exception. And have > >a protected virtual method (called CheckAvailability or so) that will throw > >a (Build)Exception if the task is not available, while specifying the > >reason. That way we could call this method as part of Task.Execute, and > >output the reason why the task is not available in the build log. > > > > > > > ok - so the bool property just checks the config file or whatever and > CheckAvailability does the runtime check. The bool property should > probably be static so that it can be called without having to > instantiate the Task class. Well, CheckAvailability would perform the actual runtime check (using the XML configuration in the NAnt configuration file, or the behaviour specified by the task), and possibly throw an exception detailing the reason why the task is not available. The IsAvailable property would just call the CheckAvailability method, and return false if the CheckAvailability method throws an exception. So, the IsAvailable property would be used to conditionally execute code based on the availability of a task, while the CheckAvailability method would be invoked by Task.Execute to ensure a task is available, and report a build failure otherwise ... > > >To be able to use this in our tests to determine whether a given test can be > >executed, we'd need to initialize the task that we want to execute though. > > > > > > > not if we make it static. That's not possible, as we always need an instance of the task that you want to check the availability of .... We could have a static method on Task that takes a task name as input, and returns a bool indicating the task availability, but I'm not sure this is the right approach as we need to allow third party tools to pass in the XML configuration node, and this can only be done by passing it to the Project ctor. So, we can have a static property that takes both a task name, and a project as input .... But I think it might be best to add this just to BuildTestBase for now, as I don't think there's much need for this right now in other places ... > It would also be worth having a task::is-available(string > taskName ) function so the check can be done from a build file. Yes, ofcourse ... Still not sure about the name of the property/function though, kinda awkward to have task::exists and task::available. In order to determine whether a task can be executed you'd have to check the value of both functions ... Gert ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email sponsored by Black Hat Briefings & Training. Attend Black Hat Briefings & Training, Las Vegas July 24-29 - digital self defense, top technical experts, no vendor pitches, unmatched networking opportunities. Visit www.blackhat.com _______________________________________________ nant-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/nant-developers
