CodeFeed

I’ve never been a user of Ant’s <record> task. It has a few issues and I don’t find it convenient to use. Record does fill a definite need, however, where you want to debug just a small section of a build file.

I decided to approach this in a different way, with the following small Task

package com.codefeed.cmtasks;

import org.apache.tools.ant.Task;
import org.apache.tools.ant.BuildListener;
import org.apache.tools.ant.BuildLogger;
import org.apache.tools.ant.BuildException;
import org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Echo;

import java.util.Vector;
import java.util.Iterator;

public class SetLogLevel extends Task {
    private int logLevel = -1;

    public void execute()
    {
        if (logLevel == -1) {
            throw new BuildException("You must specify a log level");
        }

        Vector listeners = this.getProject().getBuildListeners();
        for (Iterator i = listeners.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
            BuildListener listener = (BuildListener) i.next();

            if (listener instanceof BuildLogger) {
                BuildLogger logger = (BuildLogger) listener;
                logger.setMessageOutputLevel(logLevel);
            }
        }
    }

    public void setLevel(Echo.EchoLevel level) {
        this.logLevel = level.getLevel();
    }
}

This code simply finds any loggers listening to the build and changes their logging level. You can use it like this

    <setloglevel level="debug"/>
    <javac srcdir="${src.dir}"
           destdir="${build.dir}/classes"
           debug="on"/>
    <setloglevel level="info"/>

This sets the logging level to debug for the compilation and then back to info. Note that there is currently no way to know what level was in effect when Ant is started, so if someone is running a quiet build you may not be popular.

I don’t know if there is anything out there that already does this but I don’t recall seeing it. I’ll probably put together a few of these utility tasks into a jar and make it available at some time in the future – mainly because I needed to play with the antlib feature in Ant.