Kotlin DSL: property names containing dots cannot be looked up through property delegation

[cesar1000]

The documentation of the Kotlin DSL described the use of delegated properties to look up project properties:

val myProperty: String by project  
val myNullableProperty: String? by project

The property lookup is hardcoded to use the Kotlin value name as the name of the property, which precludes the use of dots in the name, even with backticks (as specified in the grammar). Also, I'd argue that this use of a property delegate is somewhat obscure, since it doesn't express that the value is acquired from a property. I think that something like this would be more readable and flexible:

val myProperty: String by property.property()
val myProperty: String by property()
val myProperty: String by property("name")

Also, it would be nice for the delegate to parse string values into primitive types – boolean and integer in particular are frequently used.

[vlsi]

val myProperty: String by project

It can contain more than a property. For instance, it might find a task:

val test: Task by project
println(test)

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Just wondering: do you already have a plugin / DSL for properties?

In my experience:

1. The most common property type is boolean. For instance: enableSpotBugs, ignoreSpotBugsFailures , skipCheckstyle, skipAutostyle, skipJavadoc, enableMavenLocal, enableGradleMetadata

2. Property discovery is an issue. There's no way to execute gradlew help to see the list of supported properties :-/
   That is there should be a way to supply help task with a property description.

---

So far I've settled on https://github.com/vlsi/vlsi-release-plugins/tree/master/plugins/gradle-extensions-plugin#typed-project-property-accessor which is used like the following:

val skipCheckstyle by props()
val skipAutostyle by props()
val skipJavadoc by props()
val enableMavenLocal by props()
val enableGradleMetadata by props()

...
if (project.props.bool("junit4", default = false)) {
    testImplementation("junit:junit")
    testRuntimeOnly("org.junit.vintage:junit-vintage-engine")
}

[cesar1000]

It can contain more than a property. For instance, it might find a task:

Ah, I was not aware of that! That's way too obscure, and it goes against the more explicit nature of Kotlin. I think it wouldn't hurt to enforce explicitness instead:

val test: Task by project.task()

I didn't build anything myself, and I'm just working around it ad hoc. I appreciate that there are available plugins, but this looks like a core limitation that should be addressed in the DSL itself.

[joffrey-bion]

I think you could use val prop by project.providers.gradleProperty("foo.bar.baz") for strings, and add .map { ... } for other types. I haven't tested it, though