Tricky Ant fileset (include most, but not all of a directory)

ant

I've got a case where I just can't figure out how to get Ant to pull in just the files I want in a fileset (why on earth didn't the Ant people just use regex?).

Here's the situation. I've got a bunch of classes under the classes directory. I want:

1) All of the files under classes,

2) But not those under /com/foo/bar

3) Except I do want /com/foo/bar/AbstractCustomerAdapter.class and CustomerAdapterFactory.class.

The files under /com/foo/bar are generally named things like FooCustomerAdapter.class.

In a nutshell, we create 2 jars, one with just the customer specific adpaters and one with everything else. This allows us to create a new customer adapter and swap out just that mini-jar. The fileset above that's killing me is the "everything else".

Once Ant excludes a file, no include will bring it back so items 2 & 3 are giving me heartache on how to do the fileset. How can I exclude all of my customer adapters, but not the abstract customer adapter? There's no ant-compatible wildcarding I can do to exclude the XZYCustomerAdapter classes without excluding the AbstractCustomerAdapter.

Well, at least I can't figure out one, but hopefully one of you Stack Overflow denizens is more clever than I 🙂

Best Answer

Most tasks that accept a single fileset can also accept multiple filesets.

<jar file="...">
  <fileset dir="classes">
    <exclude name="com/foo/bar/**"/>
  </fileset>

  <fileset dir="classes">
    <include name="com/foo/bar/AbstractCustomerAdapter.class"/>
    <include name="com/foo/bar/CustomerAdapterFactory.class"/>
  </fileset>
</jar>

Related Solutions

Java – How to exclude sources in a javac task in ant

A couple of people suggested using <exclude>. This didn't work with the way my task was specified. trashgod's answer linked to the sixth example on this page which gave me an idea of how to restructure my task specification.

It looks like my problem was related to the way I was specifying the source files. Rather than using <pathelement> elements in a <src>, like this:

<src>
   <pathelement location="${src.dir}/com/foo/bar/baz/" />
   <pathelement location="${src.dir}/com/foo/bar/quux/" />
</src>

I switched to using a single <src> with a path and then a set of <include> elements, like this:

<src path="${src.dir}" />
<include name="com/foo/bar/baz/**" />
<include name="com/foo/bar/quux/**" />

This appears to be functionally identical, but is compatible with the use of <exclude>:

<exclude name="${src.dir}/com/foo/bar/quux/dontwant/**"/>

(Actually, I'm surprised that what was there in the first place worked at all.)

Java – ant warning: “‘includeantruntime’ was not set”

Ant Runtime

Simply set includeantruntime="false":

<javac includeantruntime="false" ...>...</javac>

If you have to use the javac-task multiple times you might want to consider using PreSetDef to define your own javac-task that always sets includeantruntime="false".

Additional Details

From http://www.coderanch.com/t/503097/tools/warning-includeantruntime-was-not-set:

That's caused by a misfeature introduced in Ant 1.8. Just add an attribute of that name to the javac task, set it to false, and forget it ever happened.

From http://ant.apache.org/manual/Tasks/javac.html:

Whether to include the Ant run-time libraries in the classpath; defaults to yes, unless build.sysclasspath is set. It is usually best to set this to false so the script's behavior is not sensitive to the environment in which it is run.