Configuring Cobertura with Ant

Question

I'm trying to get Cobertura working for my project's Ant build, and all I have to work with are the documentation/FAQs and a sample build.xml that uses cobertura, but apparently never worked (ha!).

• I see in the Cobertura taskdef a resource called tasks.properties - what is this file and where is it located on my machine (I couldn't find it anywhere inside my Eclipse home)?
• Where am I supposed to install the cobertura.jar to, so that Ant knows how to reference it directly (instead of an absolute path)?

Thanks in advance for any help here.

Answer 1

tasks.properties is bundled inside the cobertura JAR file; you can view it like so on a UNIX-like system:

jar xf cobertura.jar tasks.properties; cat tasks.properties 

You could put cobertura.jar in the lib subdirectory of your local Ant installation if you want to it always be available, but IMO it's better to store it in a separate location and add it to your classpath explicitly in your build file. This prevents unwanted classes from being loaded in other builds.