Raible Designs

Conditional Task Execution with Ant

I'm trying to conditionally include my test jar files based on an Ant property. My problem is that the "if" attribute of the <task> element only accounts for the property being present or not. I'd love to be able to specify:

ant -Denable.cactus=false

But Ant seemingly executes my task if a property is present - so even though the value is false, it still executes. Any ideas? Here's my task:

<target name="copy-test-jars" depends="init" if="enable.cactus"
    description="Copy test-related JAR files to WEB-INF/lib">
    <echo>Copying Cactus, StrutsTestCase and JUnit JARs</echo>

    <mkdir dir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib"/>
    <!-- Copy jars -->
    <copy todir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib">
        <fileset dir="${strutstestcase.dir}" includes="*.jar"/>
        <fileset dir="${cactus.dir}">
            <include name="*.jar"/>
            <exclude name="commons-logging.jar"/>
            <exclude name="log4j-*.jar"/>
            <exclude name="servlet.jar"/>
        </fileset>
        <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib" includes="junit.jar"/>
        <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}" includes="junit-noframes.xsl"/>
    </copy>
</target>

BTW, this XML was made web-savvy by the E2 Source Code Formatter - a must-have bookmark. I got this tip from The FuzzyBlog!.

Posted in Java at Jan 15 2003, 11:19:10 AM MST 6 Comments

Comments:

The if= and unless= attributes do not test the values of the properties, they test for the presence or absence of the attribute (respectivly). If the property has had a value set it will always trip if=, regardless of the value of the property. So I would recommend changing your target to be unless="disable.cactus" and pass in ant disable.cactus=true.

Posted by Danno Ferrin on January 15, 2003 at 10:50 PM MST #

Or, use <condition> to test the actual string value of a property to set another property which will be used with if/unless. Also, your original 'ant enable.cactus=false" is incorrect syntax. It should be 'ant -Denable.cactus=false".

Posted by Erik Hatcher on January 16, 2003 at 01:17 PM MST #

Doh - I've updated the syntax - I swear it was write when I typed it on the command line ;-) I'll look into the <condition> task - good think I have these comments e-mail enabled, or I never would've known what you were implying!

Posted by Matt Raible on January 16, 2003 at 01:34 PM MST #

Erik - your solution solved my problem. I changed to using a deploy-cactus property and then in my init task, I have the following: <code>  <condition property="enable.cactus">   <istrue value="${deploy-cactus}"/> </condition> </code> Thanks!

Posted by Matt Raible on January 16, 2003 at 02:35 PM MST #

Check out the: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant-contrib It gives you the if task so you can do things like: <code> <if>   <equals arg1="${deploy-cactus}" arg2="true"/>   <then>   <echo>Copying Cactus, StrutsTestCase and JUnit JARs</echo>   <mkdir dir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib"/>      <copy todir="${webapp.target}/WEB-INF/lib">     <fileset dir="${strutstestcase.dir}" includes="*.jar"/>     <fileset dir="${cactus.dir}">       <include name="*.jar"/>       <exclude name="commons-logging.jar"/>       <exclude name="log4j-*.jar"/>       <exclude name="servlet.jar"/>     </fileset>     <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}/lib"       includes="junit.jar"/>     <fileset dir="${env.ANT_HOME}"       includes="junit-noframes.xsl"/>   </copy>   </then> </if> </code>

Posted by Anonymous on January 17, 2003 at 12:08 PM MST #

aaa

Posted by 155.70.39.45 on February 09, 2007 at 01:41 PM MST #

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