Manifest Task

Manifest

Description

Creates a manifest file.

This task can be used to write a Manifest file, optionally replacing or updating an existing file.

Manifests are processed according to the Jar file specification.. Specifically, a manifest element consists of a set of attributes and sections. These sections in turn may contain attributes. Note in particular that this may result in manifest lines greater than 72 bytes being wrapped and continued on the next line.

Parameters

Attribute	Description	Required
file	the manifest-file to create/update.	Yes
mode	One of "update" or "replace", default is "replace".	No
encoding	The encoding used to read the existing manifest when updating.	No, defaults to UTF-8 encoding.

Nested elements

attribute

One attribute for the manifest file. Those attributes that are not nested into a section will be added to the "Main" section.

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the attribute.	Yes
value	the value of the attribute.	Yes

section

A manifest section - you can nest attribute elements into sections.

Attribute	Description	Required
name	the name of the section.	No, if omitted it will be assumed to be the main section.

Examples

  <manifest file="MANIFEST.MF">
    <attribute name="Built-By" value="${user.name}"/>
    <section name="common">
      <attribute name="Specification-Title" value="Example"/>
      <attribute name="Specification-Version" value="${version}"/>
      <attribute name="Specification-Vendor" value="Example Organization"/>
      <attribute name="Implementation-Title" value="common"/>
      <attribute name="Implementation-Version" value="${version} ${TODAY}"/> 
      <attribute name="Implementation-Vendor" value="Example Corp."/>
    </section>
    <section name="common/class1.class">
      <attribute name="Sealed" value="false"/>
    </section>
  </manifest>

Creates or replaces the file MANIFEST.MF. Note that the Built-By attribute will take the value of the Ant property ${user.name}. The same is true for the ${version} and ${TODAY} properties. This example produces a MANIFEST.MF that contains package version identification for the package common.

The manifest produced by the above would look like this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Built-By: bodewig
Created-By: Apache Ant 1.5alpha

Name: common
Specification-Title: Example
Specification-Vendor: Example Organization
Implementation-Vendor: Example Corp.
Specification-Version: 1.1
Implementation-Version: 1.1 February 19 2002
Implementation-Title: common

Name: common/class1.class
Sealed: false