How do I create the equivalent of an Ant PATH?

Old Forum Archive
1

I am working on a proof of concept to convert an inhouse Ant build over to Gradle. The existing build uses PATHs and references extensively and I am getting a null when a path defined in an imported Ant file is tried to be used by the Javac Ant task.

I have a primary build and through the magic of the settings.gradle file I am calling sub-builds.

In the sub-build I am importing a build file that defines lots of useful paths so that I can change them in only one place and re-use them everywhere else.

ant.importBuild '../build-imports.xml'

I’m then making a Groovy variable out of it.

String basePath = ant.properties['base.path']

Here is my Javac line from the build:

ant.javac(srcDir: "${compileSourcecode}", destDir: "WebContent/WEB-INF/classes", source: "${compileSourceversion}", target: "${compileTargetversion}", verbose: "${compileVerbose}", debug: "${compileDebug}", deprecation: "${compileDeprecation}", optimize: "${compileOptimize}", classpathref: "${basePath}", includeAntRuntime: "${compileIncludeAntRuntime}")

The basePath variable is null instead of containing my nicely defined path.

The path in question looks like this:

<path id="base.path">
  <pathelement location="ApacheCommons/commons-lang/commons-lang.jar" />
  <pathelement location="log4j/log4j.jar" />
  <pathelement location="Acme/acme.jar" />
  <fileset dir="." erroronmissingdir="false">
   <include name="**/*.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <fileset dir="../../${project.name}Model" erroronmissingdir="false">
   <include name="**/${project.name}Model.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <fileset dir="../../${project.name}Persistance" erroronmissingdir="false">
   <include name="**/${project.name}Persistance.jar"/>
  </fileset>
    <fileset dir="../../${project.name}Service" erroronmissingdir="false">
   <include name="**/${project.name}Service.jar"/>
  </fileset>
  <path refid="server.path" />
 </path>

So how do I make this Gradle’ish? I haven’t found anything in either the Gradle userguide or the Oreilly Gradle book. Perhaps I’m just not using the right keywords?

2

Ant types with an id attribute are treated (by ant) as a reference, rather than a property. So, you should use this, instead:

def basePath = ant.references['base.path']

This will be an object of type ‘org.apache.tools.ant.types.Path’, which you can pass directly into the javac task, or convert to a String using something like:

def pathAsString = basePath.list().join(File.pathSeparator)
3

Adam, Thanks. I tried this and now it claims that the reference is not found. A step forward, but the reference absolutely does exist.

4

ant.references is a Map - you might iterate over the keys to see what’s there.

5

The proof of concept is now over. Thank you for your help. Unfortunately, but understandably in the circumstances, the decision was made to stick with Ant builds for now.