Question

So the overall problem is this:

We have multiple property files

<property file="prop1"/>
<property file="prop2"/>

prop1 contains a property looking like:

mg.prop = ${mg2.prop}

prop2 contains mg2.prop

mg2.prop = Hello

If they were in the same file and I queried mg.prop, I’d get “Hello” back. Since they are in separate files this does not work (I need to load prop1 before prop2!)

I wrote a custom ant task that does the following:

String resolved = resolveProperty(propertyName);
getProject().setProperty(propertyName, resolved);

If I run

log("Resolved property value = " + getProject().getProperty(propertyName)); 

Right after, I get the correct value.

However in the Ant script, if I do

<echo message="${mg.prop}"/> 

it shows me the original value.

Any thoughts on how to solve this?

Answer 1

Here’s how I ended up resolving this – I turfed the custom ant task.

I ended up concatenating all the properties files into one, in the reverse order of precedence.

So if I wanted properties from 3.properties to override those in 2.properties and 1.properties, I did the following:

<concat destfile="resolved.properties">
    <fileset file="1.properties" />
    <fileset file="2.properties" />
    <fileset file="3.properties" />
</concat>

<property file="resolved.properties"/>