While using Ant to generate nice-looking junit reports the other day, I came across a problem which took a while to resolve. Here is the error message:

[junitreport] jar:file:/app/fao/rds/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib/ant-junit.jar
!/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/junit/xsl/junit-frames.xsl; 
Line 37; Column 53; javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: 
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: redirect
 
[junitreport] jar:file:/app/fao/rds/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib/ant-junit.jar
!/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/junit/xsl/junit-frames.xsl; 
Line 42; Column 57; javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: 
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: redirect
 
[junitreport] jar:file:/app/fao/rds/apache-ant-1.6.5/lib/ant-junit.jar
!/org/apache/tools/ant/taskdefs/optional/junit/xsl/junit-frames.xsl; 
Line 47; Column 64; javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: 
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: redirect
 
... etc.

It appears that this is caused by incompatible version of Xalan. If you’re working on a large project (like me), you may not have the luxury of being able to switch versions of libraries very easily.

Workarounds:

a) in the part of the ant task, set format=”noframes” – this avoids the problematic stylesheet, but forces all your reports into one page.

b) You can ask junit-report to use a different stylesheet so that this problem doesn’t occur. The stylesheet in question is already distributed with ant.

1. Make a directory to contain the unit test stylesheets
2. Copy ${ant.home}/etc/junit-frames-xalan1.xsl to your-stylesheets-dir
3. Rename junit-frames-xalan1.xsl to junit-frames.xsl
4. In the part of your ant task, add
   styledir=”your-stylesheets-dir”

5. That’s it.

There’s also a bugzilla issue on this subject: http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30200