catch failure with failonerror=false for <artifact:dependencies - maven

Question

I am using maven-ant-tasks-2.1.3 to pull dependencies from an Archiva repository.I get a failure when doing a re-deploy of a release to Archiva using existing Ant scripts.I cannot use Maven directly. I want to catch the failure and not cause a build failure.I have a property file for the variable values like groupId.
I tried to pull the dependency and it fails if it doesn't exist.
<artifact:dependencies filesetId="dependency.fileset" >
<remoteRepository id="central" url="http://mvn-repo....../archiva/repository/internal/"/>
<dependency
groupId="${groupId}"
artifactId="${artifactId}"
version="${version}"
/>
</artifact:dependencies>
I also get a failure when re-deploying an artifact to Archiva repo.
<target name="deploy-to-maven">
<artifact:install-provider artifactId="wagon-webdav" version="1.0-beta-2"/>
<artifact:pom id="deploypom" file="${basedir}/pom-entity.xml" />
<artifact:deploy file="${unzip.dir}/${target.jar.name}.jar">
<remoteRepository url="dav:${repository-uri}">
<authentication username="${repository.username}" password="${repository.password}"/>
</remoteRepository>
<pom refid="deploypom"/>
</artifact:deploy>
</target>
I was hoping to check if the file exists and then set an available property to false if it doesn't exist.Then i could check that property with target deploy-to-maven.
Thanks in advance for any tips,
Vijay

Answer 1

This sounds like a good time to use ant-contrib's trycatch task:
<trycatch>
<try>
<artifact:dependencies filesetId="dependency.fileset">
<remoteRepository id="central" url="http://mvn-repo....../archiva/repository/internal/" />
<dependency
groupId="${groupId}"
artifactId="${artifactId}"
version="${version}"
/>
</artifact:dependencies>
<property name="dependency.exists" value="true" />
</try>
<catch>
<echo message="Dependency cannot be resolved." />
<property name="dependency.exists" value="false" />
</catch>
</trycatch>