ant paths and files

[John Cattanach]

Hi, this is driving me nuts - is there anyway to use a path-like structure in a copy task?

Scenario is I have a classpath reference which I use for compiling. I'm building a war, so I also need to copy these files into WEB-INF/lib. It would be nice if I only had to define the list of jars once, but as afar as I can determine, if the jars are in multiple directories I cannot use any ant type which can be both path-like and input to <copy> .

I can get around it by copying the files first, then referencing the WEB-INF/lib during the compiling. But to my mind it would be much neater to have a single <files id="externaljars" .... definition.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

John,
A <classpath> can contain a fileset element. So you could create a path that contains a single fileset with a reference to your standalone fileset.

[Ilja Preuss]

In fact, the copy task supports resource collections as inner elements, so you can use a path inside the copy task, too.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Ilja,
Is that from the resource framework that was introduced with Ant 1.7? Some people are still on 1.6. I infer that John is from his description of the problem.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Jeanne Boyarsky:
Ilja,
Is that from the resource framework that was introduced with Ant 1.7? Some people are still on 1.6. I infer that John is from his description of the problem.

Could be, could be...