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menugenerator task

What is a menu generator ?

A menu generator is supposed to generate menu. It provides some methods to write menu entries in a given menu file.

Writing your own menugenerator

To write your own menu generator you must write a java class implementing the org.apache.easyant.core.menu.MenuGenerator interface.
This interface allow you to implements the logic to generate menu entries in a menu file.

When you're own implementation is ready you'll need to register it in easyant this is done through a menu generator registry.

What is a menu generator registry ?

A menu generator registry is used to reference all the menu generator for a given context.
As explained before a menu generator is supposed to generate menu entries in one given file.
But maybe in a project we can have multiple menu files.
Let's take the example of easyant documentation, we have a root menu and we also have submenus for plugins and buildtypes.
So behind we have three different files :

• the root menu
• submenu for plugins
• submenu for buildtypes
How can we handle this with easyant ?
The answer is by using context.

We can ask easyant to manage a registry by context (if not specified the default context will be "default").
Plugins can register their menugenerator implementation is the registry for a given context.



Registering a menugenerator

The syntax looks like this

<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.MyOwnMenuGenerator" file="my.file" context="root"/>

The registermenugenerator task support classpath and classpathref attribute.

<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.MyOwnMenuGenerator" file="my.file" context="root" classpathref="my.classpath"/>

It also support nested classpath

<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.MyOwnMenuGenerator" file="my.file" context="root">
     <classpath>
          <fileset dir="/path/to/directory" incluse="**/*.jar"/>
     </classpath>
</ea:registermenugenerator>

So get back to our example talking about easyant documentation to understand the meaning of context.
We have three files so we need to register three menugenerators in different context.
Here we consider that i only uses Xooki as a documentation layer.
So the xooki plugins should do :

<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.XookiMenuGenerator" file="${basedir}/toc.json" context="root"/>
<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.XookiMenuGenerator" file="/path/to/plugins/toc.json" context="plugins"/>
<ea:registermenugenerator classname="org.mycompany.menugenerators.XookiMenuGenerator" file="/path/to/buildtypes/toc.json" context="buildtypes"/>

Here we've registered the same implementation for three different context.

We will now play with menu entries



Adding a simple menu entry

The syntax looks like this :

<ea:addmenuentry context="test" title="mytitle" targetlink="foobar"/>

The title is the label of the link in the menu. The target link means is a URL(can be relative).
The context similar as the one in task.

What happens behind ?
EasyAnt will retrieve the right registry for this context, loop and all registered menu generator implementation, and process the generation of the link.

This task also supported nested elements.



Adding a multiple menu entries

<ea:addmenuentry context="test">
    <ea:menuentry title="foo" targetlink="bar"/>
    <ea:menuentry title="bla" targetlink="plop"/>
    <ea:menuentry title="test" targetlink="test"/>
</ea:addmenuentry>