Is there any way to generate a guid in ANT?

Question

I have an ant script to manage out build process. For WiX I need to produce a new guid when we produce a new version of the installer. Anyone have any idea how to do this in ANT? Any answer that uses built-in tasks would be preferable. But if I have to add another file, that's fine.

Answer 1

I'd use a scriptdef task to define simple javascript task that wraps the Java UUID class, something like this:

<scriptdef name="generateguid" language="javascript">
    <attribute name="property" />
    <![CDATA[
    importClass( java.util.UUID );

    project.setProperty( attributes.get( "property" ), UUID.randomUUID() );
    ]]>
</scriptdef>

<generateguid property="guid1" />
<echo message="${guid1}" />

Result:

[echo] 42dada5a-3c5d-4ace-9315-3df416b31084

If you have a reasonably up-to-date Ant install, this should work out of the box.

Answer 2

If you are using (or would like to use) groovy this will work nicely.

<project default="main" basedir=".">
<taskdef name="groovy" classname="org.codehaus.groovy.ant.Groovy" 
         classpath="lib/groovy-all-2.1.5.jar" />
    <target name="main">
        <groovy>
            //generate uuid and place it in ants properties map
            def myguid1 = UUID.randomUUID()
            properties['guid1'] =  myguid1
            println "uuid " + properties['guid1']
        </groovy>
        <!--use the uuid from ant -->
        <echo message="uuid ${guid1}" />
    </target>
</project>

Output

Buildfile: C:\dev\anttest\build.xml
main:
      [groovy] uuid d9b4a35e-4a75-454c-9f15-16b4b83bc6d0
      [echo] uuid d9b4a35e-4a75-454c-9f15-16b4b83bc6d0
BUILD SUCCESSFUL

Using groovy 2.1.5 and ant 1.8