What Is a Task?

Ralf D. Müller Johannes Thorn Jody Winter Ralf D. Müller Jody Winter Dr. Stefan Pfeiffer Lars Francke

2 minutes to read

A task is another name for a script which triggers the build actions that compile and publish your docs.

This diagram gives you an overview of the entire build process:

overview.dio
Figure 1. docToolchain

How Tasks Are Named

Tasks are given a naming prefix which indicates their role in the build process. There are currently 4 groups.

generateX

These tasks use plain old Asciidoctor functionality to render the source to a given format.

exportX

These tasks export images and AsciiDoc snippets from other systems or file formats. The resulting artifacts can then be included from your main sources. export tasks differ from generate tasks because with export tasks, you don’t have to export with each build. Also, with export tasks, it’s likely that you will already store the resulting artifacts under version control because the tools needed for the export (such as Sparx Enterprise Architect or MS PowerPoint) are typically not available on your build server or another contributor’s machine.

convertToX

These tasks take the output from Asciidoctor and convert it (through other tools) to the target format. This results in a dependency on a generateX task and another external tool (currently pandoc).

publishToX

These tasks not only convert your documents but also deploy, publish and move them to a remote system (currently Confluence), meaning the result is immediately visible to others.