Question

Is this even possible? I have something like:

task taskB(dependsOn: taskA) {
    // Do stuff.
}

task taskA {
    // Do stuff.
}

task runClass(dependsOn: 'classes', type: JavaExec) {
    main = 'com.some.package.MainClass'
    classpath = some.classpath
}

I want to run taskB before classes in the JavaExec task. How might I go about this? Changing it to dependsOn: ['taskB', 'classes'] doesn’t appear to help — it still does classes first.

Edit:

Adding classes.dependsOn taskB seems to have worked. Is this the best way, though?

Answer 1

In Gradle, foo.dependsOn(bar, baz) is equivalent to foo.dependsOn(bar); foo.dependsOn(baz). It does not imply any order between bar and baz, like it would in Ant (with its soft dependencies feature).

Can you shed some light on what taskB does, and why you think that it needs to run before classes?

EDIT:

Based on your comments below, I’d do something like:

sourceSets.main.resources.srcDir "build/taskB" // output dir of taskB
processResources.dependsOn(taskB)

Of course this can be refined in many ways, but it gets the basics right.