Velocity - Anakia

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Anakia is an Ant task that executes from an Ant build file. The build file looks something like this:

    <project name="build-site" default="docs" basedir=".">
    <property name="docs.src" value="../xdocs"/>
    <property name="docs.dest" value="../docs"/>

    <target name="prepare">
        <available classname="org.apache.velocity.anakia.AnakiaTask"
        property="AnakiaTask.present"/>
    </target>

    <target depends="prepare" name="prepare-error" unless="AnakiaTask.present">
        <echo>
            AnakiaTask is not present! Please check to make sure that
            velocity.jar is in your classpath.
        </echo>
    </target>

    <target name="docs" depends="prepare-error" if="AnakiaTask.present">
        <taskdef name="anakia" classname="org.apache.velocity.anakia.AnakiaTask"/>
        <anakia basedir="${docs.src}" destdir="${docs.dest}/"
             extension=".html" style="./site.vsl"
             projectFile="./stylesheets/project.xml"
             excludes="**/stylesheets/**"
             includes="**/*.xml"
             lastModifiedCheck="false"
             velocityPropertiesFile="velocity.properties">
        </anakia>

        <copy todir="${docs.dest}/images" filtering="no">
            <fileset dir="${docs.src}/images">
                <include name="**/*.gif"/>
                <include name="**/*.jpeg"/>
                <include name="**/*.jpg"/>
            </fileset>
        </copy>
    </target>
</project>

Name

Description

basedir

Specifies the path to the directory location of your .xml files.

destdir

Specifies the path to the directory where the output files should go.

extension

This is the extension that is appended to the end of your .xml file. For example, with an extension of ".html", index.xml would be converted into index.html. By default, the extension is .html.

style

This is the path (relative to Velocity's template.loader.1.template.path) to the VelocityStyleTemplate to process. This file is the equivalent to the .xsl file in Ant's style task.

projectFile

This is the path to a "project" file. This file is an XML file that can be used as a "navigation" file. If you have used Stylebook or Struts system for generation of the web site documentation, you will understand the purpose of this file. It is an optional task argument. If you look at the Anakia example in the jakarta-velocity/examples/anakia directory, you can see the project.xml file being used in the .vsl file.

excludes

This is the standard Ant excludes attribute. Specify any files or directories that you do not want Anakia to try to process.

includes

This is the standard Ant includes attribute. Specify any files or directories that you do want Anakia to try to process.

lastModifiedCheck

This turns on or off the ability to check the last modified date on files in order to determine whether or not they need to be re-rendered or not. The value of this attribute can be "true, false, yes, no". By default, it is true, meaning that the last modified date should be checked and if the original .xml file, project file, or .vsl file have not changed, then don't process the page. This accelerates processing because pages that have not changed will not get reprocessed.

templatePath

This is the path to the templateRoot which is the directory where your site.vsl file is located. This can be defined in the Velocity.properties or it can be defined here. It it an optional argument if it is defined in the Velocity properties file already. However, if defined, this value will override the path defined in the Velocity.properties file.

velocityPropertiesFile

This is the path to the velocity.properties file. It is an optional argument and by default is set to find the properties file in the same directory that the JVM was started in.

Name

Value

$root

This contains the JDOM root Element to your .xml document. When this (or any other variable containing an element) are simply placed into template output, their XML form is rendered.

$project

This contains the JDOM root Element to your project.xml document. If you have not specified a project.xml document, then this variable will not be in the context.

$escape.getText($string)

This context object will convert HTML Entities in the $string that is passed into it and it will return the converted String. This is good for dealing with CDATA. The entities that are converted are: " -> " | < -> < | > -> > | & - > &

$relativePath

This contains a String which is the relative path to your .xml document from the baseDir that was specified in your Ant task attributes. Please see the examples/anakia .vsl document for example usage of this String.

$xmlout

This contains an class which extends the instance of the JDOM XMLOutputter() object. This allows you to easily create String output out of your JDOM element objects. $xmlout.outputString(Element). Again, please look at the examples for more information on how to use this object. NOTE: this object is obsoleted as simply specifying $element will output the XML serialized form of the element.

$xmlout.outputString(Element, true)

This contains an class which extends the instance of the JDOM XMLOutputter() object. The difference between this .outputString() and the one in XMLOutputter is that it will output all of the Elements within the passed in Element. So, if you pass in a <td> Element, you will get everything inside the <td> </td>, but not the actual <td> </td>. NOTE: this object is obsoleted as simply specifying $element.content will produce the desired output.

$treeWalk.allElements($element)

This will allow you to walk a tree of JDOM Element objects starting at $element. The point of this context object is to allow you to build an XSLT type system where you can look at each Element node conditionally and set its content and attribute values. This is probably one of the more "ugly" aspects of Anakia, but it does do the job and suggestions for improvement are appreciated. This context object is still under development and more documentation will follow soon. NOTE: this object is obsolete and is kept for backward compatibility only. You can use $element.selectNodes("//*") to achieve the same effect.

$xpath.applyTo("document/properties/@title", $root)

The W3C XPath Specification http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath/ refers to NodeSets repeatedly, but this implementation simply uses java.util.List to hold all Nodes. A 'Node' is any object in a JDOM object tree, such as an org.jdom.Element, org.jdom.Document, or org.jdom.Attribute. Please see the .vsl example file and the org.apache.velocity.anakia.XPathTool javadoc for more information. NOTE: this object is obsolete and is kept for backward compatibility only. You can use $element.selectNodes("document/properties/@title") to achieve the same effect with a more intuitive syntax.

$date

This is a new java.util.Date object. Useful for putting the current date/time into a page.