Originally posted by Chris Reeves:
Your other option here is to just fail the build if the property hasn't been set. Then you develpers will be forced to go in and set the property. It's not a great solution if you really want to change that parameter on the fly, but it would work.
I'm not sure what this parameter will be used for, so I don't know what other solutions to offer.
The original goal was to be able to have a build.xml file that would do a checkout from VisualSourceSafe (new optional tags in 1.5) and then build the code. The idea was that a developer needing to work on a certain tag branch would maybe want to set a property. If, for example, a developer is setting up a new environment just from the build.xml, they would want to enter a specific tag once via <input .../> (or just get latest, which I handle separately. At any rate, I continued along the line of my last post with the depends and multiple matching targets with if= and unless=, and it now works. I have also created a custom input using Swing so that the input tag works in my
IDE also (eclipse). Now if the property is set in the build.xml, I run the checkout target and it gets what I specified. If it's NOT set, I run the checkout target and I get a Swing prompt for a label to get, and it properly sets the target property and checks out the labeled code. Pretty cool, now that it works