Working with properties

We have now already learned that the Java plugin adds tasks and source sets to our Gradle project; however, we also get a lot of new properties that we can use. Custom properties of a plugin are set in a Convention object of type org.gradle.api.plugins.Convention. A Convention object is used by a plugin to expose properties and methods that we can use in our project. The Convention object of the plugin is added to the convention property of a project. The convention property of a Gradle project is a container for all the Convention objects from the plugins.

We can access the properties from the plugin's Convention object directly as project properties, or we can specify a complete path to the Convention object of the plugin, to get to a property or invoke a method.

For example, the sourceSets property is a property of the Convention object of the Java plugin. With the following task, showConvention, we see the different ways we have to access that property:

task showConvention...