How to defined Inputs to downstream tasks as Outputs of upstream tasks?

[sharpepd]

When chaining tasks together, quite often we need define inputs to a task that are the outputs of the upstream task. I am not sure how this is supposed to be specified in the moon.yml syntax.

These inputs may also need to be passed into the command of the task.

It seems like filegroups would be a good way to do this, but filegroups are expanded only when Moon starts its run and so the Filegroups tags like @files will be empty if produced by an upstream task, as they are not refreshed before the task runs.

Is there a solution for this already or should I raise a issue?

Another limitation I see with Filegroups, is how to get the expanded file list into a command, when the command line is limited (like in windows) - we probably need a way to export the FileGroup into a file somehow...

[milesj]

@sharpepd Yeah at the moment I'll say this is kind of undefined behavior. Like you said, tokens/file groups get resolved when the task is created/expanded in the graph, not when it runs. It works this way as we need the task information ahead of time. Maybe I can remove the caching here? But that may be a big performance hit.

However, can this be done with globs? Something like this:

tasks:
  build:
    inputs:
      - '/path/to/other/project/build/**/*'

As for the command line portion, I don't have a good answer here. You could probably use globs + tokens as well? $workspaceRoot/path/to/other/project/build/**/*

[sharpepd]

That may be possible, I guess. I just thought fileGroups looked like a way to keep things organized and clear.

I have just read your blog for Moon 1.41, it looks like the new input/output syntax might be the solution I am looking for, as it seems I can now specify the outputs of another task as inputs to the next task.

Or does this have the same limitation?

Anyway, I will have a play with this when I next get chance...

[milesj]

Yeah the new input types will work much better here, at least for the non-CLI portion.