Ant Script to Copy a Snippet of a XML to Another XML

2016-10-07 by Tomas Tulka

I know, Ant is not the most modern technology, but there are still Ant-based systems we have to maintenance.

Sometimes we need to cut or copy a piece of a XML document and save it to another.

We will use XmlTask library by OOPS Consultancy to achive this goal. 

First of all, we have to define an Ant task:

<taskdef name="xmltask" classname="com.oopsconsultancy.xmltask.ant.XmlTask" />

Don't forget to put the downloaded library into the Ant libs folder or onto the classpath:

ant ... -lib xmltask.jar

Let's consider two XML configuration files:

conf.xml

<configuration>
  <applications>
    <app id="MyCoolApp" />
    <app id="AnotherApp" />
  </applications>
</configuration> 

settings.xml

<settings>
...
  <apps>
    <app id="thisAppWasAlreadyHere" />
  </apps>
</settings>

And we want to merge those documents in the way we get this content of the settings.xml:

<settings>
  ...
  <apps>
    <app id="thisAppWasAlreadyHere" />
    <app id="MyCoolApp" />
    <app id="AnotherApp" />
  </apps>
</settings>

We can use the xmltask's command call to get a path-defined snippet into the buffer and append it with the command insert.

Here is the whole code: 

<xmltask source="conf.xml">
  <call path="configuration/applications/app" buffer="apps_storedXml">
    <param name="id" path="@id" />
    <actions>
        <echo>Merge the app id="@{id}"</echo>
        <xmltask source="settings.xml" dest="settings.xml">
          <insert path="settings/apps" buffer="apps_storedXml" />
        </xmltask>
    </actions> 
  </call>
</xmltask>

That's it!