Calling the same task multiple times in a single build.gradle file - gradle

Question

I have a custom Gradle plugin that will generate Java files from a template file. I have several such template files in different locations, and I need to "compile" all of them to generate the Java files I need. Once I have the files, I want to package them into a .jar.
One way I thought I could do this was to call the "compile template" task multiple times from within the same build file. I'd call it once in a task that compiles template files in location A, again from a task that compiles template files from location B... etc., until I have all the Java files I need.
Something like this:
task compileFromLocationA <<{
compileTemplate.execute(A)...
}
task compileFromLocationB
compileTemplate.execute(B)...
...
packageJar(depends: compileFromLocationA, compileFromLocationB, ...)
...
However, you can't programmatically call a task from within another task. I suppose I could break each compileFromLocation_ task into it's own build.gradle file, but that seems like overkill. What's the "best practice" in a case like this?

Answer 1

This code seems to work in build.gradle by using tasks.register() - e.g. to perform multiple source code generating steps - in my case I needed to load different pairs of files (XML schema and generation options) in two different steps:
plugins {
id 'java'
id "com.plugin" version "1.0"
}
sourceSets.main.java.srcDirs += file("${buildDir}/genSrc")
sourceSets.test.java.srcDirs += file("${buildDir}/testGenSrc")
tasks.compileJava {
dependsOn tasks.named("genMessage")
}
genMessage {
codesFile = "${projectDir}/src/main/resources/file.xml"
}
def testGenModel1 = tasks.register("testGenModel1", com.plugin.TestGenModelTask.class) {
schema = "${projectDir}/src/test/resources/file.xsd"
options = "${projectDir}/src/test/resources/file.xml"
}
def testGenModel2 = tasks.register("testGenModel2", com.plugin.TestGenModelTask.class) {
schema = "${projectDir}/src/test/resources/file2.xsd"
options = "${projectDir}/src/test/resources/file2.xml"
}
tasks.compileTestJava {
dependsOn tasks.named("testGenModel1"), tasks.named("testGenModel2")
}