Benefits of maven default filters directory [closed]

Question

Recently I have discovered maven resource filtering and saw one note in documentation:

Standard Directory Layout
src/main/filters Resource filter files

I have noticed that maven does not search files declared in <filter> tag in this directory by default. So what are the benefits of sticking with Maven Layout in this case (except structure uniformity ofcourse)?

Answer 1

Basically you're assuming that the files that are present in src/main/filters (or src/test/filters) are themselves filterable. That assumption isn't correct.

The purpose of the src/main/filters folder is to contain the resource filter files that will be used by Maven during the filtering action.

For instance, imagine that you have the following property defined:

<project>
...
<properties>
    <my.property>foo</my.property>
</properties>
...
</project>

And now imagine that you're filtering some folder:

...
<resource>
    <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
    <filtering>true</filtering>
</resource>
...

With that definition, any file inside src/main/resources that contains ${my.property} will be replaced by foo.

Now imagine that you don't want to change your POM every time you want to add a new property.

Then is when src/main/filters comes into action. Instead of placing your properties in your POM, you create a file under src/main/filters with your properties and you add a filter to your POM:

<project>
    ...
    <name>Some Project</name>
    ...
    <build>
        ...
        <filters>
            <filter>my-filter.properties</filter>
        </filters>
        ...
    </build>
    ...
</project>