content/apt/guides/mini/guide-generating-sources.apt

 ------
 Guide to generating Sources
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 Jason van Zyl
 Karl Heinz Marbaise
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 2005-10-12
 2016-06-11
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Guide to generating sources

 Let's run though a short example to try and help. To generate sources you must first have a plugin that
 participates in the <<<generate-sources>>> phase 
 like the {{{http://www.antlr.org/api/maven-plugin/latest/}ANTLR4 Maven Plugin}}.

 So this is all fine and dandy, we have a plugin that wants to generate some
 sources from a Antlr4 grammar but how do we use it. You need to specify that
 you want to use it in your POM:

+----+

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.antlr</groupId>
        <artifactId>antlr4-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>4.5.3</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>antlr</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>antlr4</goal>
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

+----+

 If you then type <<<mvn compile>>> Maven will walk through the 
 {{{../introduction/introduction-to-the-lifecycle.html}lifecycle}}
 and will eventually hit the <<<generate-sources>>> phase and see you have a plugin configured that
 wants to participate in that phase and the ANTLR4 Maven Plugin is executed with
 your given configuration. Furthermore during the compile you can observer that
 all the generated code (from your grammar files) will automatically being compiled 
 without supplemental configuration.


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