CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gradleandroid-gradle-plugin
Mark Parnell
Mark Parnell

Reputation: 9215

Dynamically adding gradle projects at runtime

I'm in the process of updating our build process for Android to use gradle. We have client-specific apps - i.e. a single code template which is used as the basis for all the apps which are created dynamically.

To build the apps, I loop through a CSV file to get the details for each one. I then take a copy of the source template, inserting the client's name, images, etc. before compiling the app. This works fine in the current system. In the gradle version, I've got it successfully looping through the rows and creating the app source for each one with the right details. However when I try to actually build the app, it fails with the message:

Project with path ':xxxxxx' could not be found in root project 'android-gradle'.

From reading the documentation, I understand that this is because the project doesn't exist during the configuration phase as it's not created until the execution phase. However what I haven't been able to find is a way around this. Has anyone managed to achieve something similar? Or perhaps a suggestion for a better approach?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2230

Answers (2)

Mark Parnell
Mark Parnell

Reputation: 9215

While Peter's answer pointed me in the right direction, it ended up not being a workable solution. Unfortunately with nearly 200 apps to build, creating a copy of the source for each one was too big an overhead and gradle kept running out of memory.

What I have done instead is to make use of the Android plugin's product flavors functionality. It was quite straight forward dynamically adding a productFlavor for each row in the CSV (and I can do that in build.gradle rather than settings.gradle), and I just set the srcDir to point to the relevant images etc for each one.

Upvotes: 0

Peter Niederwieser
Peter Niederwieser

Reputation: 123890

One option is to script settings.gradle. As in any other Gradle script, you have the full power of Groovy available. Later on you can no longer change which projects the build is composed of. Note that settings.gradle will be evaluated for each and every invocation of Gradle, so evaluation needs to be fast.

Upvotes: 4

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