Introduction

The SWIG Plugin calls the swig compiler on a number of specified swig files and generates java and c++/c wrapper code.

The swig executable to run on your platform is downloaded as a NAR file (see FreeHEP NAR Plugin for details on the format). This NAR file includes the binary executable for swig and the include directories for running it. With the <groupId>, <artifactId> and <version> tags you can override this behaviour to use a newer or other version of swig. You can also use the <exec> tag point to a locally installed version of swig.

SWIG will compile the source file specified by the <source> tag. It currently only compares if that file is newer than the target (flag), so you should use -Dswig.force=true to force re-running swig if needed. You can also skip running swig by specifying -Dswig.skip=true.

If your sources (include files) contain C++ you need to specify the <cpp> tag.

SWIG will add the following paths to be included in its search:

  1. User include directories specified by the <includePaths> and <includePath> tags.
  2. Source directory src/main/swg with the swig source file, overrideable by the sourceDirectory tag.
  3. src/main/include
  4. Include directories of all the dependent NAR files.
  5. Java include directory of the swig installation (from the SWIG NAR file).
  6. Include directory of the swig installation (from the SWIG NAR file).

The generated C++ or C code (dependent on the <cpp> tag) ends up in the directory specified <targetDirectory> tag, defaulting to target/swig and appended by cxx or c. This directory is added to the compile source paths for further processing by the NAR plugin or any other plugin handling native code.

The only supported target language at this time is java. The generated java sources are added to the source compile path for compilation with the maven-compiler-plugin. You can override where the java generated sources go by specifying the <javaTargetDirectory> tag. The actual directory will also reflect the setting of the packageName tag. Currently the generated java files are not picked up by the maven-apidoc-plugin, unless you set <javaTargetDirectory> to src/main/java.

Warnings can be suppressed by adding them (as numbers) to the list in the <noWarn> tag.