Hi folks,
I had a chance to do some tinkering last night on a feature that I have
desperately wanted in Nant for quite some time. The ability to do inline
task definitions in XML that orchestrate a number of other tasks. It
works like this:
<project name="test">
<taskdef name="foobar">
<echo message="Hello" />
<echo message="World" />
</taskdef>
<target name="build">
<foobar />
</target>
</project>
I've managed to get an implementation of this working by making a number
of minor modifications to the source. The list of source files affected
is:
1. Project.cs
Added a loop to the InitializeProjectDocument method which reads the
taskdef elements and creates a task builder for them. Also modified the
loop that executes the global tasks so that it ignores the taskdef
elements and doesn't treat them as tasks.
2. TaskBuilder.cs
Added a new constructor which takes an XmlNode so the task builder can
pass that onto the InlineTask instance when it is created. Also added a
property IsInline as a flag to the task builder's CreateTask (modified)
method to know to handle them in a special way.
3. InlineTask.cs
This is a new class. This class takes the XmlNode that was stored with
the TaskBuilder when the project file was read in. It's a TaskContainer
so it just calls ExecuteChildTasks (modified).
4. TaskContainer.cs
Added an overload for ExecuteChildTasks which allows the InlineTask
class to override which XmlNode it users to parse over.
I think that is pretty much it, although if I went through and did it
again I'd be tempted to refactor things a little bit. Anyway, where I
see this being useful is helping lower the barrier to entry for task
developers by allowing them to just have .build files that they can
include in without having to cut real code (and therefore have a build
system for that code). I've tested that this works with include files
and it does (so far).
You might be wondering how this differs from target elements, and I
think there is little difference to be honest, other than it feels more
consistent when all you are doing is orchestrating the functionality of
a number of tasks for reuse. It could also drive a few other tweaks such
as the ability to have "private properties". On the taskdef element,
somehow I'd like to be able to specify attributes which can be used just
like properties for the tasks contained within the taskdef, but have
their scope limited just for that run.
I think there is enough to bite off there!
----------------------------------------
- Mitch Denny
- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- http://www.monash.net
- +61 (414) 610141
-
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