The PCT plug-in requires Ant 1.9 or higher, and has only been tested with 1.9.6 version of Ant. To obtain more information about this wonderful build tool, visit the official Ant home page.

PCT binaries can be used with either version 9, version 10 or version 11 of OpenEdge ; using version 8 requires manual compilation.

The PCT plug-in comes as a single .jar file (as of build #167).

Before you can use the PCT tasks in your build scripts, you have to add them to your system. The simplest way to install PCT is to copy the JAR file into the $ANT_HOME/lib directory. In this case, you just have to declare the tasks in your build script as follows :

<taskdef resource="PCT.properties" />
<typedef resource="types.properties" />
<!-- Next line only for tasks using OpenEdge parser, see ClassDocumentation task -->
<typedef resource="extras.properties" />

You can also use the -lib attribute in the command line if you don't want to copy PCT.jar in $ANT_HOME/lib.

It's also possible to keep PCT.jar in a separate directory. In this case, declare the tasks as follows :

<taskdef resource="PCT.properties" classpath="/path/to/PCT.jar" loaderRef="pct" />
<typedef resource="types.properties" classpath="/path/to/PCT.jar" loaderRef="pct" />
<!-- Next line only for tasks using OpenEdge parser, see ClassDocumentation task -->
<typedef resource="extras.properties" classpath="/path/to/PCT.jar" loaderRef="pct" />

As of February 2011, you can call ANT with -DPCT-SRC=true to force PCT to work with its source code instead of the compiled version.

ant -DPCT-SRC=true your_target_name

When working with source code, you'll need a working OpenEdge development license with development tools and include files.

PCT tasks can be used with XML namespaces. Check Antlib namespaces before using that. One way to use PCT this way is to declare the pct namespace in your project :

<project xmlns:pct="antlib:eu/rssw/pct" xmlns:extras="antlib:eu/rssw/pct/oedoc">
  <!-- Next two lines only if PCT.jar doesn't live in $ANT_HOME/lib -->
  <taskdef uri="antlib:eu/rssw/pct" resource="eu/rssw/pct/antlib.xml" classpath="/path/to/PCT.jar" />
  <taskdef uri="antlib:eu/rssw/pct/oedoc" resource="eu/rssw/pct/oedoc/antlib.xml" classpath="/path/to/PCT.jar" />
...
</project>

After having declared PCT, you'll be able to use PCT tasks in this manner :

  <pct:run procedure="..." />
  <pct:compile ... /> 

Documentation shows "old" names first, followed by the name in the pct namespace.

Please note that the behavior of PCT remains unchanged whichever style you're choosing. Old names are not deprecated, and will live a long life...