title: Eclipse, ant and custom tasks
body: <p>Sorry, I'm not terribly experienced with Ant.</p>
  
  <p>I like the eclipse "Export ant buildfile" function, but I need to insert a few custom tasks (Copying files, calculating checksums that are used at runtime, etc).</p>
  
  <p>How do I integrate custom ant tasks with the antfile that Eclipse exports?  Also, once I've done so, will the internal build (Run...) pick it up or will I always have to use the external ant file to build from now on?</p>
  
  <p>Oh, and I don't want to edit the build.xml that is exported from Eclipse, because I'd like to be able to regenerate it later.</p>
  
  <p><b>Edit/Update:</b></p>
  
  <p>It took me a while to figure out what was going on--so I thought I'd put some notes here to clarify.</p>
  
  <p>When you create a new ant file in your directory and put <code>&lt;?eclipse.ant.import ?&gt;</code> on the first line of your custom ant script (I called mine test.xml), next time you export the buildfile from Eclipse into that directory, it'll see that tag and add <code>&lt;import file="test.xml"/&gt;</code></p>
  
  <p>With that Import, the targets in your "Custom" file (test.xml) become valid targets in your exported build.xml (or whatever name you chose when you exported it).</p>
  
  <p>After this, anytime you select "build.xml" in Eclipse, the targets pane will also include targets from "test.xml"</p>
  
  <p>Also, after that, you can go into your project properties/Builders and add a new builder of type "Ant Build", then select targets to use for building, clean, etc.</p>