How to get up-to-date state of a task

Help/Discuss
1

In a Gradle project with a number of tasks, how can I query the up-to-date state of a task after project evaluation?
Or, putting it another way, how can I check if the task will be executed without actually running the build?

3

Hi Nikita,

currently, you cannot query the up-to-date state of a task without trying to execute it. Could you provide your use-case, so we can either provide a different solution to your problem or add the desired feature to Gradle?

Cheers,
Stefan

4

The use case is a small IDE feature (“show bytecode for a class”). If the class is built by Gradle, the IDE needs to check, if the resulting class file is up-to-date.

5

Since checking up-to-dateness of a task without executing is not possible at the moment, what will happen in the IDE now? How will the IDE experience improve once such capability is provided?

6

at the moment, Byte Code Viewer does not work, when building is delegated to Gradle. Once IDE can determine up-to-date state of a task, it will be able to handle the case of out-of-date sources by interacting with user (e.g., suggest to run the build or put off the operation).

7

What we can do is check the up-to-date state of the ancestry of a SourceSet, i.e. check the up-to-date state of the tasks building the source set and all of their dependency tasks. This is possible to implement currently.

8

You can’t query the state of a task by itself, as dependent tasks might modify its state. However, if all the task’s dependencies are up-to-date, then we can determine whether or not the task is up-to-date just by looking at its inputs and outputs.

9

@n_s_skvortsov Wouldn’t simply running the task work for you? If it’s up-to-date, Gradle will not make any changes.

10

In current IntelliJ workflow, the user is asked if compilation should be triggered ( as it is time/cpu consuming and may not be suitable to do a the moment ). Just running a task unconditionally does not seem to be a good plan. I think, I could add some “beforeTaskAction” listeners and stop Gradle right before anything is executed, assuming this means “out of date”.

11

@n_s_skvortsov: Have you been successful with using TaskListener.beforeActions to implement your use case?