Question

The build.xml has a test and a build target. The test target obviously depends on the build target.

How can I run the test target only, temporarily skipping the compilation, without modifying the build.xml file ?

I’m asking because the compilation is too long, and kept up-to-date by a continuous integration server ; and I’m chasing after an issue with the unit tests.

Answer 1

No, you can’t skip it without modifying the build file.

Here is what I do in my projects to solve this issue. For every public target I will create a private target with ‘do-‘ in front of it. The private target has no dependency, and the public target has the ‘do-‘ target as a dependency.

For example:

<target name='compile' depends='init, do-compile' description='Compiles all of the source code' />  <target name='do-compile'>         <javac destdir='${classes.dir}' debug='true' encoding='ISO-8859-1'>             <src refid='src.path' />             <include name='*.java' />             <classpath refid='external.libraries.classpath' />         </javac> </target>