Question

I’m trying to setup a build file and I was curious if you can use wildcards in a property to denote filepaths? Or what a better way to tackle this problem is?

As you can see below I want all the files or directories in ${dirtwo} that start with “foo-” to be resolved, versus having to manually include each directory/file as a property.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project name="core" default="build" basedir=".">
  <property name="dirone" value="path/to/dir/one" />
  <property name="dirtwo" location="path/to/dir/two/foo-*" />

  <target name="phpmd" description="Generate pmd.xml using PHPMD">
    <exec executable="phpmd">
      <arg line="${dirone},${dirtwo}
                 xml
                 codesize,design,naming,unusedcode
                 --reportfile ${basedir}/build/logs/pmd.xml" />
    </exec>
  </target>
  ...
</project>

Currently, all I get are errors no matter how I try to use a wildcard or escape one.

Buildfile: /var/www/server/project/build.xml

phpmd:
     [exec] The given file "/var/www/server/project/path/to/dir/two/foo-*" does not exist.
     [exec] Result: 1

Answer 1

An Ant DirSet matches directories against includes/excludes patterns. You could combine it with Pathconvert as shown below.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="core" default="build" basedir=".">
  <property name="mybase.dir" location="/path/to/your/base/dir" />
  <dirset dir="${mybase.dir}" includes="**/foo-*" id="directories" />
  <pathconvert pathsep=", " property="directory-list" refid="directories" />

  <target name="phpmd" description="Generate pmd.xml using PHPMD">
    <exec executable="phpmd">
    <arg line="${directory-list} 
               xml
               codesize,design,naming,unusedcode
               --reportfile ${basedir}/build/logs/pmd.xml" />
    </exec>
  </target>
</project>

To test the results of dirset and pathconvert, you can use:

<echo message="${directory-list}" />