Shackelford, John-Mason wrote:
> Then it occurs to me this morning: if we are adding properties only after
> having loaded the HashTable we have no guarantee that the properties are
> truly added in the order specified by the property file, which seems odd to
> me since it means I've been incredibly lucky in nearly 10k + lines of
> buildfiles and scores of properties files I've written in the past six
> months.
>
> I knew I had adopted the practice of property composition within property
> files after having read something suggesting it. I didn't see anything in
> the current docs about thiit though and I took a quick look through _Java
> Tools for Extreme Programming_ and _Ant: The Definitive Guide_ but didn't
> see it there either.
But you didn't consult THE definitive guide, _Java Development with Ant_ :)
I quote:
"Loading properties from a properties file
A useful method to provide configuration and settings information to a
build process
is to load all name/value pairs from a properties file that creates
internal Ant properties
for each one. To demonstrate: we create a file named build.properties in
the root directory of our project, where our build file lives. This file
has the following
contents:
build.debug=off
To load it we use one of the variants of the <property> task:
<property file="build.properties"/>
Property values in the properties file may also contain property
references. For example,
consider a properties file containing these lines:
build.dir=build
output.dir=${build.dir}/output
When loaded, output.dir will have the value build/output.
Forward-referencing
property values may be used in a single properties file as well; if the
previous lines
had been in opposite order, the same results would be obtained. Circular
definitions
will cause a build failure.
NOTE Properties that refer to relative paths are best set using the location
variant. See �Fixing properties to absolute path locations.� Properties set
from a properties file are set as a simple values."
(sorry for the ugly wrapping, cutting and pasting from the PDF file)
I use property file composition like this extensively and it works very
nicely.
Erik
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