CODEWITHSUNDEEP
maven
D-Dᴙum
D-Dᴙum

Reputation: 7890

Can a property be expanded relative to its defining POM and not any child(ren)

I am trying to set several properties in a parent aggregation POM project which are therefore available to all module projects:

<modules>
    <module>module1</module>
    <module>module2</module>
    <module>module3</module>
</modules>
<properties>
    <module1.dir>${project.basedir}</module1.dir>
    <module1.build.dir>4{project.basedir}/build</module1.build.dir>
</properties>

The properties relate to various directories I intended them to be evaluated relative to the parent POM

I want to refer to the above properties in a second module (module2) like so:

${module1.build.dir}

However when I look at the effective POM of module2, the following expansion results:

<module1.build.dir>_project_root_directory_/module2/build</module1.build.dir>

What I would like is the value of ${module1.dir} etc. to be expanded relative to the parent POM (where it is defined). Is there anyway to do this in Maven or am I going to have to set some environment variables in a script to do this?

The reason for trying to do this is that I am doing an unusual build in that module1 is a pure native library, module2 is a JNI library that depends on module1 and module3 is a pure Java library that depends directly on module2.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 852

Answers (1)

radai
radai

Reputation: 24192

no, maven does the inheritance 1st (so constructing a leaf pom's effective-pom by combining all of its parents), and only then evaluates properties.

this means properties are always evaluated in the context of the child pom in your case.

this is a requirement for maven to behave properly. look in the super pom and you will see things like:

<build>
    <directory>${project.basedir}/target</directory>
    ...
</build>

which define where sources are looked for and where target classes are written to. they must be evaluated post-inheritance (in the context of a child).

workaround you could use a property value like ${project.parent.basedir}, or you could "look sideways" by using ../sibling-module/whatever. neither of these is pretty.

alternative for maven builds involving native components, have you looked at the maven nar plugin? it was developed for these situations specifically.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions