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05.02.2008 - Stefan Jäger

In some cases, ANT has it’s limitations. For example, it is not really easy to create an if-else structure or a for-loop. For this reason, a few people started long time ago the Ant-Contrib project. Just download it and put the jar file in the lib folder of the project. Then, just at following line to the build file:

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties"></taskdef>

Now, you can start using constructs like if, foreach and combine these tasks with usual ANT tasks. Here a little example:

with antcontrib:

<target name="theultimateconditionmachine">
  <if>
    <equals arg1="${foo}" arg2="bar" />
    <then>
      <echo message="property foo is bar" />
    </then>
    <else>
      <echo message="property foo is not bar" />
    </else>
  </if>
</target>

without antcontrib:
if you want to perform the same task with ant, you need to create 4 (!) ant targets:

<target name="noway">
  <antcall target="conditionIf"/>
  <antcall target="conditionElse"/>
</target>
 
<target name="conditionDef">
  <condition property="conditionIsTrue">
    <equals arg1="${foo}" arg2="bar"/>
  </condition>
</target>
 
<target name="conditionIf" depends="conditionDef" if="conditionIsTrue">
  <echo message="property foo is bar"/>
</target>
 
<target name="conditionElse" depends="conditionDef" unless="conditionIsTrue">
  <echo message="property foo is not bar"/>
</target>

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