Reporting Project Releases

You have published project releases. Now would be a good time to discover how to let your users know where to find them. Let's add a release report to the project web site.

How do I do that?

The XDoc plug-in has a nice feature: it can generate a download report listing all past releases, with a link to the artifacts and the release announcements. Let's use it on the QOTD packager project. The packager is the project that generates the main QOTD distributable, so it makes sense to have it generate the download report.

First, tell the XDoc plug-in where the artifacts are published. You do this by using the maven.xdoc.distributionUrl property. Add it to the qotd/packager/project.properties file:

maven.xdoc.distributionUrl=http://www.mavenbook.org/maven/mdn/zips/

The distribution URL is an important piece of information missing from the POM. It will be added in the near future. The XDoc plug-in needs information about the releases that have been made. It gets this information from the POM by scanning the version tags. Let's imagine that you've already released versions 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9 of the packager project. Add the following version information to qotd/packager/project.xml:

[...]
  </repository>
  
  <versions>
               <version>
               <id>0.7</id>
               <name>0.7</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_7</tag>
               </version>
               <version>
               <id>0.8</id>
               <name>0.8</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_8</tag>
               </version>
               <version>
               <id>0.9</id>
               <name>0.9</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_9</tag>
               </version>
               </versions> 
[...]

You saw in the previous lab that the Announcement plug-in can generate announcement reports. It would be nice to add them to the download report so that users who want to download your software can know what the download contains. The download report will automatically add the announcement reports if the XDoc plug-in can find a changes.xml file with releases matching the version tags of the POM. Add one to qotd/packager/xdocs/changes.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  
<document>
  <properties>
    <title>Changes</title>
  </properties>
  <body>
    <release version="1.0-SNAPSHOT" date="in SVN">
      [...]
    </release>
    <release version="0.9" date="2005-03-22">
      [...]
    </release>
    <release version="0.8" date="2005-03-10">
      [...]
    </release>
    <release version="0.7" date="2005-03-01">
      [...]
    </release>
  </body>
</document>

You're all set! Reap the fruits of your hard labor by typing maven site. It'll generate a download report, as shown in Figure 4-16.

Download report showing QOTD packager's releases, including release notes

Figure 4-16. Download report showing QOTD packager's releases, including release notes

Note that there is a visible Downloads link in the left menu that draws the attention of visitors.

What about...

...having a Downloads link on the master QOTD web site?

Yes, you're right, the Downloads link in the packager project is nice, but it isn't very visible for visitors who will arrive on the top-level site. The solution is to write a qotd/xdocs/downloads.xml XDoc document linking to the different subprojects' download reports. Indeed, it's possible that several subprojects produce distributable artifacts and this solution allows you to list them all on the main downloads.xml page.

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