Maven and android - Slightly different builds for

Ok I am switching from ant to maven on an android project and wondering if it the following would be easy to implement:

Currently I have a custom build.xml script which has several targets for creating release builds. Each of them is used to build the application to run against a different server URL, where the server can be a dev, production, staging, or even deployment servers we have in other countries.

The reason is that our application will run against several different servers depending who gets it, and I don't want that to be something the user chooses. Instead it should be hardcoded into the application, which is how it works currently.

This is fairly easy to setup in ant, I just take the values from the [env].properties file, and then replace out server_url string in res/values/config.xml. For instance:

ant release-prod

Would pull read a file named prod.properties which defines what the server_url was. I store the config.xml file in config/config.xml as so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resources>
    <string name="config_server_url">@CONFIG.SERVER_URL@</string>
</resources>

Then my ant script does this:

<copy file="config/config.xml" todir="res/values" overwrite="true" encoding="utf-8">
    <filterset>
           <filter token="CONFIG.SERVER_URL" value="${config.server_url}" />
    </filterset>
</copy>

Where config.server_url was defined in prod.properties.

I'm wondering how I could accomplish something similar with Maven? Any ideas. I looked up how to read property files with maven and it looked like the results were mixed whether that would work or not.

In Maven, this is called resource filtering, android-maven-plugin support filtering the following resource types:

AndroidManifest.xml, see this answer.
assets/, see this answer.
res/, see below.

Sample res/value/config.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resources>
  <string name="config_server_url">${config.server.url}</string>
</resources>

Sample pom configuration for filtering all xml file under res/ directory:

<build>
  <resources>
    <resource>
      <directory>${project.basedir}/res</directory>
      <filtering>true</filtering>
      <targetPath>${project.build.directory}/filtered-res</targetPath>
      <includes>
        <include>**/*.xml</include>
      </includes>
    </resource>
  </resources>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
      <executions>
        <execution>
          <phase>initialize</phase>
          <goals>
            <goal>resources</goal>
          </goals>
        </execution>
      </executions>
    </plugin>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>com.jayway.maven.plugins.android.generation2</groupId>
      <artifactId>android-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <extensions>true</extensions>
      <configuration>
        <sdk>
          <platform>10</platform>
        </sdk>
        <undeployBeforeDeploy>true</undeployBeforeDeploy>
        <resourceDirectory>${project.build.directory}/filtered-res</resourceDirectory>
      </configuration>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</build>

There are several ways to define the substituted value, you can define them in an external properties file with properties-maven-plugin. For simplicity, I prefer to use Maven profiles and define them in pom.xml, like so:

<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>dev</id>
    <properties>
      <config.server.url>dev.company.com</config.server.url>
    </properties>
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <id>Test</id>
    <properties>
      <config.server.url>test.company.com</config.server.url>
    </properties>
  </profile>
  <profile>
    <id>Prod</id>
    <properties>
      <config.server.url>prod.company.com</config.server.url>
    </properties>
  </profile>
</profiles>

Then use mvn clean install -Pxxx to build corresponding apk.