How to exclude transitive jar dependency in Gradle?

Question

My project depends on dependency A and dependency B.

Dependency A also depends on dependency B, but a different version of it.

The problem is in project A's build.gradle dependency B is included as a jar directly using the file and fileTree methods:

dependencies {
    compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar'])
    compile files('libs/B.jar')
}

My project's build.gradle looks like this:

dependencies {
    compile 'com.B:B:myvesion'
    compile('com.A:A:theirversion') {
        exclude module: 'B'
    }
}

But my build fails with this exception:

Execution failed for task ':myproject:transformDexArchiveWithDexMergerForDebug'.
> com.android.build.api.transform.TransformException: com.android.dex.DexException: Multiple dex files define Lcom/B/someclass;

I want to exclude the jar version of B from my project and use my version. How do I do this? Seems like the exclude instruction doesn't work in my case.

Answer 1

You can't do it for the jar files.

You can exclude transitive dependencies (described in the pom file). The jar file is not a transitive dependency.