Maven: A Developer's Notebook

Reporting Project Releases

You have published project releases. Now would be a good time to discover how to let your users know where to find them. Let's add a release report to the project web site.

How do I do that?

The XDoc plug-in has a nice feature: it can generate a download report listing all past releases, with a link to the artifacts and the release announcements. Let's use it on the QOTD packager project. The packager is the project that generates the main QOTD distributable, so it makes sense to have it generate the download report.

First, tell the XDoc plug-in where the artifacts are published. You do this by using the maven.xdoc.distributionUrl property. Add it to the qotd/packager/project.properties file:

maven.xdoc.distributionUrl=http://www.mavenbook.org/maven/mdn/zips/

The distribution URL is an important piece of information missing from the POM. It will be added in the near future. The XDoc plug-in needs information about the releases that have been made. It gets this information from the POM by scanning the version tags. Let's imagine that you've already released versions 0.7, 0.8, and 0.9 of the packager project. Add the following version information to qotd/packager/project.xml:

[...]
  </repository>
  
  <versions>
               <version>
               <id>0.7</id>
               <name>0.7</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_7</tag>
               </version>
               <version>
               <id>0.8</id>
               <name>0.8</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_8</tag>
               </version>
               <version>
               <id>0.9</id>
               <name>0.9</name>
               <tag>QOTD_PACKAGER_0_9</tag>
               </version>
               </versions> [...] ...