Watching for module changes

While developing code in MarkLogic, you ideally want a cycle of:

1. Create or modify a module
2. Test it, either manually or via an automated test

That is - ideally, you don't need to take any action to load the new/modified module into your modules database.

To support this cycle, ml-gradle features a task named mlWatch that will load new/modified modules as you create/modify them. It checks every second for any such modules, so you have at most a one second delay.

mlWatch will also tell you what it's loading when you use the Gradle "-i" or "--info" flag, so it's best to run it as:

gradle -i mlWatch

Doing something after one or more files are loaded

In version 3.8.3 of ml-gradle, you can add an implementation of java.util.function.Consumer that accepts a java.util.Set of Spring Resource objects. If mlWatch loads at least one file, the Consumer will be invoked with a Set with one Resource per file that was loaded. The original use case for this was to make a call to MarkLogic to clear a cache, but your consumer of course can perform any action.

Here's an example of simply printing out the set of loaded modules:

mlWatch.onModulesLoaded = {
  set -> println "Modules loaded: " + set
}

Ignoring already "dirty" files

In version 3.1.0 of ml-gradle, you can also tell mlWatch to ignore any files that are "dirty" - i.e. ones that have been created/modified since modules were last loaded. mlWatch will then only load modules that are created/modified after mlWatch starts watching:

gradle -i mlWatch -PignoreDirty=true

Also see Loading modules with static checking for support for statically checking modules as they're loaded.