Hello everyone,
Currently I have a project that has a build.properties file that looks
like this:
libdir=${env.CHECKOUTAREA}/lib
builddir=${env.CHECKOUTAREA}/build
...
and so on. User is expected to specify CHECKOUTAREA before running Ant.
My build.xml then looks like this:
<property file="build.properties"/>
<path id="compile.classpath">
<fileset dir="${libdir}">
<include name="**/*.jar"/>
</fileset>
</path>
(Actually the compile.classpath includes a bunch more stuff but I'm
shortening.)
This works well for us. Anybody that needs to create a new target that
involves java compilation can then just invoke compile.classpath.
Ok, enough setup, here's my question. If CHECKOUTAREA is not set,
build.properties will blindly set the properties incorrectly. I would
like to write a target that fails if the environment variable is not set,
and only if it does not fail, then go ahead and load the properties. So I
have this:
<target name="setProperties">
<fail message="Please set CHECKOUTAREA" unless="env.CHECKOUTAREA"/>
<property file="build.properties"/>
</target>
(I removed the earlier call to <property file>)
This works. The problem is that the <path id=compile.classpath> block has
already been executed at this point, with bad information because it runs
at a time when <property file="build.properties"> has not yet run. But if
I put the <path> identifier inside the setProperties target, then no one
else can use it.
In this particular example I've just realized that I can fix it -- I can
load up the build.properties file first and then check to see whether the
env variables were set, because if they're not, I'm failing anyway. But I
would like to ultimately replace that "just fail if they're not set" with
"if they're not set, query the user for them interactively" and I think
the problem would be the same -- waiting on <path id> until Ant has all
the necessary information.
Anybody have any thoughts for me?
Thanks very much!
Duane
