Grammatica Reference Manual

Apache Ant Interface

Grammatica can be run from Apache Ant. In order for Apache to find the Grammatica task, however, a simple task declaration is required. An example of such a task declaration is present in the figure below:

<taskdef resource="ant-grammatica.properties"
         classpath="grammatica-1.6.jar" />

Figure 2. The Ant task declaration needed to make the grammatica task available.

The <grammatica> Task

The <grammatica> task allows the following attributes:

grammar
The grammar file to use. This attribute is required
failonerror
Stops the build process if a grammar error was found. Defaults to "true".

The grammar processing is defined in one or more subelements, such as <csharp>, <java>, or <validation>. At least one such subelement must be present, but multiple elements are also allowed.

The <csharp> Subelement

The <csharp> subelement controls the C# source code generation. It allows the following attributes:

dir
The source code output directory. This attribute is required
namespace
The namespace to use. If not present, no namespace declarations will be created (default).
prefix
The class name prefix. By default, this is set to the base name of the grammar file.
public
The public type access flag. If set to true all types (classes and interfaces) will have public access. Otherwise they will have internal access. Defaults to "false".

The <java> Subelement

The <java> subelement controls the Java source code generation. It allows the following attributes:

dir
The source code output directory. This attribute is required
package
The Java package to use. If not present, the default package will be used (i.e. no package declaration). Note that required package subdirectories will be created under the dir directory.
prefix
The class name prefix. By default, this is set to the base name of the grammar file.
public
The public type access flag. If set to true all types (classes and interfaces) will have public access. Otherwise they will have package protected access. Defaults to "false".

The <visualbasic> Subelement

The <visualbasic> subelement controls the Visual Basic.NET source code generation. It allows the following attributes:

dir
The source code output directory. This attribute is required
namespace
The namespace to use. If not present, no namespace declarations will be created (default).
prefix
The class name prefix. By default, this is set to the base name of the grammar file.
public
The public type access flag. If set to true all types (classes and interfaces) will have public access. Otherwise they will have internal access. Defaults to "false".

The <validation> Element

The <validation> subelement allows for different tests and validations of the grammar and/or data files. It allows the following attributes:

type
The validation type. This attribute is required, and must be set to "debug", "tokenize", "parse", or "profile".
inputfile
The data input file to validate. This attribute is required for all but the "debug" type (that ignores this attribute).
quiet
The quiet output flag. If set to "true", no parse tree or similar will be printed. Defaults to "false".

Example Code

A simple example of how to use the Grammatica Ant task is shown in the figure below.

<taskdef resource="ant-grammatica.properties"
         classpath="grammatica-1.6.jar" />
<grammatica grammar="simple.grammar">
  <java dir="src"
        package="com.test.simple"
        public="true" />
</grammatica>

Figure 1. A piece of simple Ant code for using Grammatica create a Java parser for simple.grammar.