Question

I am using Ant to build my software. Ant creates an Xml file with the echoxml function and then provides the created xml file to another special program.

Now I would like to list the content of a directory in the echoxml tag.

How can this be done? My final xml file should look something like this, only providing a path to the directory:

<SomeXmlTag>

<cp>directory/firstFile.jar</cp>

cp>directory/secondFile.jar</cp>

<cp>directory/XYZFile.jar</cp>

</SomeXmlTag>

Answer 1

EchoXML is an ant tast which is already specified to take a nested xml string as its contents, outputting those contents directly to a file (or to the console). So according to the documentation, it doesn’t satisfy your needs.

However, it is pretty simple to modify a standard ant task to do this using the javax xml extensions and along with a the File api.

First, See http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/echoxml.html, and confirm that EchoXML does not do what you need it to do.

Now, a simple solution is to implement your own xml writer task … to simply write your own class :

public class MyFileTreeWriter extends Task {
    public void execute() {
           File dirs = new File("./");
           //Alternatively, you can use apache's FileUtils directory walkers https://commons.apache.org/io/api-1.4/index.html?org/apache/commons/io/DirectoryWalker.html      

  // Psuedo code below,  uses standard javax.xml.* packages ... 
  for (String file : dirs.listFiles()){
  Element em = document.createElement("file");
  em.appendChild(document.createTextNode(file);
  rootElement.appendChild(em); 

    }
}

And then add this to your build :

<target name="use" description="MyFileTreeWriter task" depends="jar">
    <taskdef name="writeDirs" classname="MyFileTreeWriter" classpath="${ant.project.name}.jar"/>
</target>