Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

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 Ant -projecthelp command
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 FilterReaders
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 ...