ant mail task using mail and activation jar in external location

Question

I have following ant mail task -

Answer 1

Unforunately you can't. You have to put Library Dependencies into the ant classpath somehow.

This could be the ANTH_HOME/lib dir or a change to the command line arguments.

Ant has a command-line argument to specify a lib dir:

-lib <path> specifies a path to search for jars and classes

You could also call ant from ant itself with that info, which may be a bit ugly:

<exec executable="ant">
  <arg value="-lib"/>
  <arg value="PATH_TO_MY_LIB"/>
  <arg value="target"/>
</exec>

If you execute this task from eclipse, you can add the libs to the run definition of the task and share this run definition with other developers.

Answer 2

See this answer to a similar question for a solution of library dependencies in ant.

In short, put all your ant addon libs, e.g. mail.jar,activation.jar, commons in a special folder and make it available for all your ant scripts via ANT_ARGS.
Being forced to use the exec task in ant to resolve a library dependency seems VERY strange.

In Eclipse common practice is to create a module in your repository (cvs,subversion,git). Then every team member has that module in his workspace and simply uses Window > Preferences > Ant > Runtime > Global Entries to make those dependencies available for ant.

Answer 3

There is a nice approach which is already answered here. It solves this problem with the Ant Tasks Classloader:

<taskdef resource="net/jtools/classloadertask/antlib.xml" 
    classpath="ant-classloadertask.jar"/>
<!-- now you can load activation.jar and mail.jar into the project's classpath -->
<classloader loader="project">
    <classpath>
        <pathelement path="lib/activation.jar"/>
        <pathelement path="lib/mail.jar"/>
    </classpath>
</classloader>