Nested property expansion...

[David Weller <dg...@yahoo.com>]

Apologies in advance is this has been asked before, but...

Why is it not possible to recursively expand names within the XML buildfiles?
Example (slightly bogus, but I hope it conveys my point):
<property name="file" value="file.java"/>
<property name="fq_file" value="${basename}/${file}"/>
<property name="${fq_file}" value="Hello there"/>
<echo message="The property ${fq_file} contains ${${fq_file}}"/>

When I run this in verbose mode, the property is correctly set, but I can't
print the value out through the echo task.  My guess is (originally) that it
had to do with the XML parsing, but this really seems like a problem with the
echo task.  Am I right?

P.S. -- If this has an 'obvious' solution, be gentle with me, my Ant knowledge
is 4 hours old :-)


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Re: Nested property expansion...

[Stefan Bodewig <bo...@bost.de>]

>>>>> "DW" == David Weller <dg...@yahoo.com> writes:

 DW> Why is it not possible to recursively expand names within the XML
 DW> buildfiles?

because you can't 8^).

When Ant encounters a ${xyz} construct it looks up a property of the
name xyz. It doesn't even try to see whether xyz holds ${} which could
be translated again. 

And I really don't think I'd like to add it, there should always be a
cleaner way to achieve the same result - a way that'd be far more
readable. What would you really want to do with it? Do you have a real
example?

Stefan