How to translate task keyword in DSL into groovy call?

Old Forum
1

I am a java programmer. I understand that most of the DSL magic happens with the groovy syntax sugar over java. I am trying to understand the one with task. For example

task myTask (type:Tar, dependsOn anotherTask){
//clousre
}

How is this translated? I guess it first go to ‘Project.task(myTask)’, which gives you a Task object. But how to handle the next section ‘(type:Tar, dependsOn anotherTask)’?

1 Like
2

Hi, the snippet above is resolved to a method call

Project#task(“myTask”, type:Jar, dependsOn: anotherTask)

to get this working with the snippet above, AST transformation is used. See

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Compile-time+Metaprogramming+-+AST+Transformations for more details

cheers, René

3

Thanks.

But here is the API info I found for Project:

Task task(String name, Closure configureClosure)
  Task task(Map<String, ?> args, String name)
   Task task(Map<String, ?> args, String name, Closure configureClosure)

Which one fits this call?

4

The second one.

5

But what about the closure? Is it the second because the closure is empty?

6

My comment referred to Rene’s code. The original code corresponds to ‘Task task(Map<String, ?> args, String name, Closure configureClosure)’.

7

Why is that? Groovy can automatically guess the wrong order? Should my original one be ‘Task task(String name,Map args, Closure configureClosure)’ ?

8

It’s due to how named arguments work in Groovy. They are “collected” into a leading parameter of type ‘Map’ at compile time.

9

Thank you very much. I read this post http://mrhaki.blogspot.de/2009/09/groovy-goodness-named-parameters-are.html and now I understand. Very interesting. So in principle, I can have code like the following?

task type:Tar myTask dependsOn:anotherTask {
//clousre
}

Cool!