How to read a property from an ant build file to a gradle build script?

Question

I am looking for a possibly clean and concise way of extracting a property from ant's build.xml file.

I know I could use ant.importBuild 'build.xml' but this would import all the targets, possibly causing name clashes eg with the java plugin, which is a known issue .

I am using gradle 1.6.

Answer 1

One way is to manually parse the XML file, for example using Groovy's XmlSlurper class. However, this won't replace any property references occurring in the property value. Another way is to configure an org.apache.tools.ant.Project object (similar to how ant.importBuild does it), and get the property value from there. Something like:

import org.apache.tools.ant.Project
import org.apache.tools.ant.ProjectHelper

task printPropertyValue {
    doLast {
        def antProject = new Project()
        ProjectHelper.configureProject(antProject, file("build.xml"))
        def value = antProject.getProperty("some.property")
        while (value.contains('${')) {
            value = antProject.replaceProperties(value)
        }
        println value

    }
}

There may be a better way to recursively replace property references, but I couldn't find one.

Another potential solution is to use an external properties file that's read both by Ant and Gradle.