Ant uses reflection to pass data from XML to the Java class that implement an Ant task. For every attribute in XML, you have to define a setter in the Java task’s class.
This works fine most of the time, however, in some cases there could be a need for a dynamic list of attributes. For example a task can pass attribute values to some external tool that has its own set of parameters that you don’t want to hardcode in Ant. Or you may simply like the flexibility of using dynamic attributes as opposed to predefined setters.
In order to implement dynamic attributes, first you need to override “maybeConfigure” method in your Ant task and have it do nothing:
public void maybeConfigure() throws BuildException {
}
Then in your “execute” method you can access the map of attributes (that represents all attributes set in XML) as follows:
RuntimeConfigurable configurator= getRuntimeConfigurableWrapper();
Map attributes=configurator.getAttributeMap();
String attr1=(String)attributes.get("attr1");
Note that in this case Ant does not do property substitution (for ${}), so you would need to explicitly invoke project.replaceProperties for each attribute value.