Ant: instant property file

Good time of the day my patient readers. Yesterday among the millions I saw the second big solar eclipse in my life. The first one I've watched through the soot-covered glass, this one I observed one through the DVR-R disk. The benefits of the progress as they are, aren't they?

Today I'm going show you a little workaround for the situation when you need a property file, but you can't afford it or don't want to keep sensitive information in the plain-text file on the file system. I have run into such issue with the SOA test automation. Oracle offers a set of the Ant tasks for the build, deploy, and test composites. Although, test task requires JNDI properties in form of the property file.

You could create such files one for every target environment, but I foresee without a crystal ball your administrators and security team will be quite unhappy with that. I have tried to substitute the properties from the file, but it doesn't work at all. Test task still wants to read property file.
The next my thought was: if I can't store the file, but I need one, what if I create one at run-time and drop it when the task is completed. So there are such Ant commands and it works with the SOA automation just fine.

<!-- create temporary file for the JNDI propeties -->
<tempfile property="jndi.properties" prefix="jndi" 
                  suffix=".properties" deleteonexit="true"/>
      
<!-- Add properties to the temporary file -->      
<propertyfile file="${jndi.properties}">
 <entry key="java.naming.factory.initial"
                   value="weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory"/>
 <entry key="java.naming.provider.url"
                   value='${test.target.url}/soa-infra'/>
 <entry key="java.naming.security.principal" value="${user}"/>
 <entry key="java.naming.security.credentials" value="${password}"/>
 <entry key="dedicated.connection" value="true"/>
 <entry key="dedicated.rmicontext" value="true"/>
</propertyfile>  

The task tempfile creates a new empty file. You can specify prefix and suffix and some other attributes, Task updates or creates the specified property (jndi.property in the example) with the file name and path as a value. The attribute deleteonexit helps you with the temporary file elimination.Temporary file disappears when the task is done.

The propertyfile task populates our temporary file with the properties. Task writes all its' children entries to the file. Don't forget to check task documentation, it can do country mile more than just store properties in the files.

Now you can use your temporary property file as a parameter for the SOA test tasks or for any other purposes where you need one.