Setting dynamic velocity properties for archetype maven projects

Question

I am creating an archetype and want to create a project wide available property containing things like the current date and an all lower case variant of the artifact id. I found the following post on Stackoverflow, that shows how it normally should be possible.

I tried adding this to the archetype-metadata.xml like so:

    ...
    <requiredProperty key="artifactIdLower">
        <defaultValue>${artifactId.toLowerCase()}</defaultValue>
    </requiredProperty>
    <requiredProperty key="ldt">
        <defaultValue>${package.getClass().forName("java.time.LocalDateTime").getMethod("now").invoke(null)}</defaultValue>
    </requiredProperty>
    <requiredProperty key="dtf">
        <defaultValue>${package.getClass().forName("java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter").getMethod("ofPattern", $package.getClass().forName("java.lang.String")).invoke(null, "dd MMM yyyy")}</defaultValue>
    </requiredProperty>
    <requiredProperty key="date">
        <defaultValue>${ldt.format($dtf)}</defaultValue>
    </requiredProperty>
    ...

The property artifactIdLower works like a charm, but the ldt, dtf and date don't seem to work, giving the error:

Null reference [template 'dtf', line 1, column 1] : ${package.getClass().forName("java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter").getMethod("ofPattern", $package.getClass().forName("java.lang.String")).invoke(null, "dd MMM yyyy")} cannot be resolved.

After that I tried to see where in the chain this null reference comes from. I was able to set pkgClass to $package.getClass() (or to $package.Class),

but after that I was unable to set $strClass to $package.getClass().forName("java.lang.String") or to $pkgClass.forName("java.lang.String") (funnily enough, both pkgClass and strClass should be a Class object).

This made me wonder if there is a restriction on using reflection inside the archetype-metadata.xml.

My question is: how can I set dynamically generated property values (like above) that can be used project wide?

I don't want to have to define these properties in every file that I create, because there might be more properties that I want to add later.

Edit: I tried to instead create a generalproperties.vm file that contained the #set directives. This file would then be loaded by every file on the first line using #parse("generalproperties.vm"). While I did get the file to be parsed from within the pom.xml file, it didnt behave as I wanted.

The following input

test
$null
#set( $ldtClass = $package.getClass().forName("java.time.LocalDateTime") )
$ldtClass.Name
$ldtClass.getMethod("now")
#set( $ldtNowMethod = $ldtClass.getMethod("now") )
$ldtNowMethod.Name
#set( $clsLoader = $package.getClass().getClassLoader() )
$clsLoader
#set( $ldtClass2 = $clsLoader.loadClass("java.time.LocalDateTime") )
$ldtClass2.Name
$ldtClass2.getMethod("now")
#set( $ldtNowMethod2 = $ldtClass2.getMethod("now") )
$ldtNowMethod2.Name
#set( $ldt = $ldtNowMethod2.invoke($null) )
$ldt
#set( $dtf = $package.getClass().forName("java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter").getMethod("ofPattern", $package.getClass().forName("java.lang.String")).invoke($null, "yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss") )
$dtf

Generated the following output:

test
$null
java.time.LocalDateTime
$ldtClass.getMethod("now")
$ldtNowMethod.Name
$clsLoader
$ldtClass2.Name
$ldtClass2.getMethod("now")
$ldtNowMethod2.Name
$ldt
$dtf

The first 3 outputs are as expected, but after that I don't get the results I want. If someone is able to solve either of the above issues (with the metadata file or the generalproperties file), it would be highly appreciated.

Answer 1

This should work:

...
<requiredProperty key="date">
    <defaultValue>${package.getClass().forName("java.time.LocalDateTime").getMethod("now").invoke(null).format($package.Class.forName("java.time.format.DateTimeFormatter").getMethod("ofPattern", $package.Class).invoke(null, "dd MMM yyyy"))}</defaultValue>
</requiredProperty>
...