# Using the Ant view

Eclipse provides a standard view, the Ant view, that lets you work with your Ant buildfiles. This view is tree-structured, showing Ant buildfiles as top-level entries and targets & internal targets as children. The main advantage of this view is that you can work with all of your Ant buildfiles in one place, as opposed to hunting them down in one of the navigation views.

1. Open the Ant view from the workbench menu by selecting Window > Show View > Ant.
2. By default, the Ant view is empty. There are three ways to add Ant buildfiles to this view:
   - Click Add Buildfile []. This brings up a dialog in which you explicitly select those Ant buildfiles you want to add
   - Click Add Buildfiles with Search []. This brings up a search dialog in which you can specify a filename pattern for your Ant buildfiles and search within the entire workspace or a specified working set.
   - Drag and drop buildfiles from other views to the Ant view.
     Once added to the Ant view, Ant buildfile entries remain in the view across workbench invocations until explicitly removed or the associated project is closed.
3. Click Add Buildfiles with Search. Suppose you only remember that the buildfile you want to work with starts with `H`. Enter `H*.xml` for the buildfile name. Make sure Workspace is selected for the scope, then click Search. The `HelloWorld.xml` file is found and placed in the Ant view.
4. Expand the top-level entry to see the default target `Hello`, and the internal target `World`.
5. Select the `World` internal target and click Run the Selected Target []. Notice that just the `World` target gets executed.
6. Select the top-level `HelloWorld` buildfile and click Run the Default Target of the Selected Buildfile []. Notice that just the default target, `Hello`, gets executed.
7. To edit your buildfile, bring up the context menu on the `HelloWorld` file and select Open With > Ant Editor.
8. To edit the default launch configuration, select Run As > Ant Build... from the context menu.
9. The Run Ant launch configuration dialog appears. Here you can modify the way in which the buildfile is run from the Ant view.
10. Select the `HelloWorld` file, then click the Remove button. The buildfile is removed from the view.
    Note: This does not delete the file from the workspace.

Creating Ant buildfiles
Editing Ant buildfiles
Saving & Reusing Ant options
Running Ant buildfiles
Creating a project builder Ant buildfile
Ant buildfiles as project builders
Executing project builders
External tools
Non-Ant project builders
Stand-alone external tools