Question

I need to write an Ant target that appends together (comma-delimited) a list of ‘.jar’ file names from a folder into a variable, which is later used as input to an outside utility.
I am running into barriers of scope and immutability. I have access to ant-contrib, but unfortunately the version I am stuck with does not have access to the ‘for’ task. Here’s what I have so far:

<target name="getPrependJars">
    <var name="prependJars" value="" />
    <foreach param="file" target="appendJarPath">
        <path>
            <fileset dir="${project.name}/hotfixes">
                <include name="*.jar"/>
            </fileset>
        </path>         
    </foreach>

    <echo message="result ${prependJars}" />
</target>


<target name="appendJarPath">
    <if>
        <equals arg1="${prependJars}" arg2="" />
        <then>
            <var name="prependJars" value="-prependJars ${file}" />
        </then>
        <else>
            <var name="prependJars" value="${prependJars},${file}" />
        </else>
    </if>       
</target>

It seems that ‘appendJarPath’ only modifies ‘prependJars’ within its own scope. As a test, I tried using ‘antcallback’ which works for a single target call, but does not help me very much with my list of files.

I realize that I am working somewhat against the grain, and lexical scope is desirable in the vast majority of instances, but i really would like to get this working one way or another. Does anybody have any creative ideas to solve this problem?

Answer 1

You might be able to use the pathconvert task, which allows you to specify the separator character as comma.

<target name="getPrependJars">
    <fileset id="appendJars" dir="${project.name}/hotfixes">
        <include name="*.jar" />
    </fileset>
    <pathconvert property="prependJars" refid="appendJars" pathsep="," />

    <echo message="prependJars: ${prependJars}" />
</target>