tasks as subroutines

[Tony Smith]

This probably isn't ant-like, I'd like to hear suggestions.

I have several projects each with a build.xml file in the same relative place, and each build.xml has a task called (shock) "build". I want to be able to fetch each project out of CVS and invoke each project's build file.

Here's what I have which doesn't work:

<target name="go">
<echo>Processing ${package}</echo>
<cvs package="${package}" dest="${buildroot}" />
<ant antfile="build.xml"
     dir="${buildroot}/${package}"
     target="build" />
</target>
 
<target name="utils_setup">
<property name="package" value="Utils" />
</target>
 
<target name="utils" depends="utils_setup, go" />
 
<target name="core_setup">
<property name="package" value="Core" />
</target>

<target name="core" depends="core_setup, go" />
 
        <target name="build" depends="utils, core" />

The idea was to use 'go' as a subroutine, effectively. But it looks like once 'go' has been invoked once it doesn't get invoked again.

Antcall seems like real overkill. Can someone suggest a more elegant method?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Tony,
You could make "go" a macrodef (like a function) or you could make a list of projects and loop through them using "for" (of ant-contrib).

Note that there is another problem with the code above. Properties are immutable. So once you set the property once, it will never be set to the next value.

[Ajith Kallambella]

You may want to checkout my article on Ant in this month's JavaRanch Journal, especially the section on chaining and auto discovering.

Good luck!