Ant script: Prevent duplication of JAR in javac-classpath war-lib

Question

I have a ANT script and I have a lot of duplicated path to same set JAR files. But there is so many double wording in the classpath and also in the war element.

Answer 1

Since Ant 1.8.0 there is a new resource collection - mappedresources that can be used in place of the war task lib element.

So, the task might look like this (pretty much straight from the docs):

This feature was added to resolve a long-standing feature request to make the task flatten jars when deploying to WEB-INF/lib.

previous answer:

Although you can't easily convert a path to a fileset with vanilla Ant, you can go the other way. So one option would be to define your jars in a fileset, and derive the path from it. Something like this perhaps:

Another possibility is to use the ant-contrib pathtofileset task.