How to turn directories to .jar files with Ant

Question

How to turn a list of directories into a list of .jar files ? It seems that using Copy Task and Mappers is the right way to do this but I did not find any nested element creating a jar file from a directory.

Of course, the list of directories would be computed and not hard coded in the ant script.

For instance, a foo directory contains bar1, bar2 and bar3 directories. The script would create bar1.jar from the bar1 dir, bar2.jar from bar2 dir and bar3.jar from bar3 dir The script would create a bar4.jar from a newly added bar4 directory without any change in the script (no hardcoded list).

Thanks ahead for your help

Answer 1

You can use the subant task to do this. For example:

<project name="jars" default="jar" basedir=".">
    <property name="dir.build" value="${basedir}/build"/>
    <property name="dir.root" value="${basedir}/foo"/>

    <target name="init">
        <tstamp/>
        <mkdir dir="${dir.build}"/>
    </target>

    <target name="jar" depends="init">
        <!-- ${ant.file} is the name of the current build file -->
        <subant genericantfile="${ant.file}" target="do-jar">

            <!-- Pass the needed properties to the subant call. You could also use
                 the inheritall attribute on the subant element above to pass all
                 properties. -->
            <propertyset>
                <propertyref name="dir.build"/>
            </propertyset>

            <!-- subant will call the "do-jar" target for every directory in the
                 ${dir.root} directory, making the subdirectory the basedir. -->
            <dirset dir="${dir.root}" includes="*"/>
        </subant>
    </target>

    <target name="do-jar">
        <!-- Get the basename of the basedir (bar1, bar2, etc.) -->
        <basename file="${basedir}" property="jarname"/>

        <jar jarfile="${dir.build}/${jarname}.jar" basedir="${basedir}"/>
    </target>
</project>

Answer 2

You could use the appropriate Jar task, along with the foreach ant-contrib extension task.

A sample:

<foreach list="${hmProjectsList}" delimiter="/," 
         target="cvsCheckOut" param="hmProjectDir" inheritall="true" />