Handling Data Using Types
Ant supports a number of types, and the rest of this chapter is devoted to understanding them and how to work with them. These types work much like data types in programming languages, and as you're going to see, types and properties are intertwined. The data structures you create using types can be assigned to properties, and the data you use to set up those data structures is often stored in properties. Now that you've got properties under your belt, it's time to move on to types.
Much of what a build tool like Ant does is work with files in directory structures, so you might expect that many of the Ant types have to do with handling files and directories. You can see the available Ant core (that is, built-in) types in Table 2-7.
Table 2-7. Core Ant types
Type | Description |
---|---|
Assertions | Enables, or disables, Java 1.4 assertions |
Description | Holds a description of the project that can be
viewed if you use the |
DirSet | Contains a group of directories |
FileList | Contains a named list of files |
FileSet | Contains a groups of files |
File mappers | Maps original filenames to a new set of names |
FilterChains | Contains a group of ordered |
FilterSet | Contains a group of filters |
PatternSet | Contains a group of filename-matching patterns |
Path-like structures | Includes a wide variety of support for specifying file paths |
Permissions | Contains the security permissions given to the code as executed in the JVM where Ant is currently running |
PropertySet | Groups ... |
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