Question

As part of a content migration project, I am building content into a CMS on a weekly basis, and I use an Ant script to copy the content files to the build directory. Up until now, we’ve been wiping the CMS and reloading the whole 17,000-file set every time, which takes about 1.5 hours. But now that the content and the CMS customisations are more stable, we’d like to only upload the content files that have been modified since the previous week.

I can copy files modified since the last time I ran the Ant script using the <modified> selector:

<copy todir="changed" failonerror="no">
  <fileset dir="output" includes="*.*">
    <modified/>
  </fileset>
</copy>

Which works very nicely. However, I would like to be able to load the files that have been modified since the last CMS build that took place on the server. So I was wondering if there was some way of using <modified>’s cache-based approach to only copy the files that have been modified since a given date/time like “17.00 last Thursday” instead of “last time this script was run”.

Answer 1

I got the answer I was looking for on the Ant mailing list where Stefan Bodewig suggested using the update parameter on the modified selector. As I’m using Ant 1.7.1., I had to work around a bug that prevented its direct use as an attribute, but essentially, by setting it using a property set on the command line, I can update the cache whenever I do a production build, and leave the cache as it is when I do an intermediate test build.

Here is the code I ended up with (including workaround for 1.7.1.):

<copy todir="\content\Test\" includeEmptyDirs="false" failonerror="no">
  <fileset dir="../Output">
    <modified>
      <param name="update" value="false"/>
    </modified>
  </fileset>
</copy>