Ant Developer’s Handbook

Programmatic Errors

Of all the different types of errors that can occur, programmatic errors are the most common. Most of the discussion from here on will focus on dealing with these type of errors. A good XML editor combined with a DTD can be useful in helping you find a subset of programmatic errors that might not otherwise be picked up until the time of execution. The XML editor should use the DTD to expose all the attributes supported by a particular XML element. It should also highlight the required attributes. Again, this technique does make it more difficult to include user-defined tasks and data types.

It is helpful to review the Ant documentation as you are building a target. As a rule of thumb, I avoid placing more than one major ...