Question

I have an ant script to manage out build process. For WiX I need to produce a new guid when we produce a new version of the installer. Anyone have any idea how to do this in ANT? Any answer that uses built-in tasks would be preferable. But if I have to add another file, that’s fine.

Answer 1

I’d use a scriptdef task to define simple javascript task that wraps the Java UUID class, something like this:

<scriptdef name="generateguid" language="javascript">
    <attribute name="property" />
    <![CDATA[
    importClass( java.util.UUID );

    project.setProperty( attributes.get( "property" ), UUID.randomUUID() );
    ]]>
</scriptdef>

<generateguid property="guid1" />
<echo message="${guid1}" />

Result:

[echo] 42dada5a-3c5d-4ace-9315-3df416b31084

If you have a reasonably up-to-date Ant install, this should work out of the box.