Troubleshooting “failed to create task or type foreach” when using

Question

I\'m trying to use the foreach loop in an Ant script but I get the message: Problem: failed to create task or type foreach Cause: The name is undefined.

I don\'t und

Answer 1

I can't find the foreach task in the Ant 1.8 manual - where is it? I only know the task from ant-contrib, and it requires to specify the 'target' attribute: http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/tasks/tasks/foreach.html

Answer 2

have you ever considered <script>? in this tag you can use some famous script language like javascript and python. they can also interact with the Project, Task... Object of Ant, which means you can set/get the properties and even excute another task. look at this example which comes from the book "java development with ant"

    <project name="script_example" default="test-random">
      <description>
        Use a script task to generate a random number, then
        print it
      </description>
      <target name="random">
        <script language="javascript"><![CDATA[
          //NB: an unqualified Math is the JavaScript object
          var r=java.lang.Math.random();
          var num = Math.round(r*10);
          project.setNewProperty("random", num);
          self.log("Generated random number " + num, project.MSG_DEBUG);
        ]]>
        </script>
      </target>
      <target name="test-random" depends="random">
        <echo>Random number is ${random}</echo>
      </target>
    </project>

Answer 3

It is a standard task that would be part of the latest version of Ant (1.8).

No, it's not. At least I can't find it in the list of core and optional tasks in the ant manual. It seems to be part of the ant-contrib project and thus needs to be installed separately.

Answer 4

I had the same issue under eclipse with various versions of ant.

Add this into your code WITHOUT adding parameters under eclipse (do not specify any classpath) :

<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antcontrib.properties" classpath="/path/to/ant-contrib/ant-contrib-1.0b3.jar"/>

Answer 5

You haven't defined a target to call:

<foreach param="instance" list="a,b,c,d,e" target="processListItem" />

alternatively:

<for param="instance" list="a,b,c,d,e" >
  <sequential>
    <!-- Do Something with @{instance} -->
  </sequential>
</for>