Thanks, I've got a variation of this that works great. I appreciate your advise. I've also learned more about the general state of 'Ant' from the followups, and I appreciate those as well.
Just FYI, what I did was this - when I do the 'clean' target, I use "exec touch" to create a file called "need.idl.made". Then, I can use the available property to control the idl2java target. That target runs if "need.idl.made" is present. Within the idl2java target I use the delete task to remove "need.idl.made" and so the next time I compile, the idl2java step is skipped. This way, I only needed one target to set the property, and didn't need the custom task to set a second property based on the first property. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > There is a pretty easy way around your problem if you are willing to create > more targets in your build, use a custom task, and use the "if" attribute > of the target. > >
