Question

I’m trying to write a timestamp as a context parameter into my context.xml at that time I execute my Ant script.

I was trying the following:

my context.xml

<Parameter name="deployingTimeStamp" 
    value="16.07.2012" <!-- shall be changed! -->
    override="true" />

my build.xml

<tstamp>
    <format property="time" pattern="dd.MM.yyyy"
    unit="hour"/>
</tstamp>

<replace file="${conf.dir}/dev/context.xml" >
    <replacefilter token="deployingTimeStamp" value="${time}" />
</replace>

Unfortunately it doesn’t replace the value, it just replaces the name “deployingTimeStamp” itself and changes it to the current date.

How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

The replacefilter token is going to replace the token you define. Why don’t you add a placeholder value in the XML (i.e. [[buildTimeStamp]] ) and then use:

<replace file="${conf.dir}/dev/context.xml" >
    <replacefilter token="[[buildTimeStamp]]" value="${time}" />
</replace>

So your original xml would be

<Parameter name="deployingTimeStamp" 
value="[[buildTimeStamp]]" <!-- shall be changed! -->
override="true" />

---

Additional tips based on comment discussion:

What you might not be doing is copying your main source files into a build directory to perform your replaces first. This is pretty standard in build scripts which is why I mentioned you check your files out of source control first. If you are not using source control and have a folder on your computer then you need to copy the files from that folder to another folder first before performing your replace and other packaging of the app.

  <copy todir="../dest/dir">
    <fileset dir="src_dir" excludes="**/*.java"/>
  </copy>

Something like above where you copy source to working directory. THEN you perform your actions on it, and afterwards remove it when you have a package (i.e. jar file or war file or something if java). You can view the delete functionality in Ant’s documentation as well:

• http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/copy.html