Question

I get a very confusing reaction from my ant build-file and I’m wondering whether I’m just not clever enough or this might actually be a bug.

I’ve got the following property set globally in my project:

<property name="lib.dir" location="lib"/>

Then I’ll try to add some files out of this directory into a jar file via fileset (more than one resource):

<fileset dir="${basedir}" includes="lib/*filename*"/>

There should be (and exist) 3 different libraries, which are matched that way. However, if I try to use the following, it doesn’t work and no files are included:

<fileset dir="${basedir}" includes="${lib.dir}/*filename*"/>

Note that the only differences lies in the usage of the global property. Now the simple question: why does the first version work as advertised, but the second doesn’t?

Answer 1

Please check the actual value of “lib.dir” just before and maybe after the task that uses the “fileset” expression. Just to make sure, that it hasn’t been changed accidently after you’ve set it globally. The <echo/> task can help.

---

Maybe I got the solution. The description of the locationattribute is:

Sets the property to the absolute filename of the given file. If the value of this attribute is an absolute path, it is left unchanged (with / and \ characters converted to the current platforms conventions). Otherwise it is taken as a path relative to the project’s basedir and expanded.

Simply use the value attribute instead of location. Here’s a test script to show the difference:

<project name="test">

    <property name="test1" location="lib"></property>
    <property name="test2" value="lib"></property>

    <target name="target" description="description">
       <echo>${test1}</echo>
       <echo>${test2}</echo>
    </target>

</project>

The output on my system is as follows:

Buildfile: D:\Develop\workspace-jabber\scrapbook\build.xml
target:
     [echo] D:\Develop\workspace-jabber\scrapbook\lib
     [echo] lib
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 307 milliseconds