Msbuild- 'DependsOnTargets' that contain condition - msbuild

Question

I tried to have a condition on a Target tag, but resulted with the error:
target has a reference to item metadata. References
to item metadata are not allowed in target conditions unless they are part of an item transform.
So i found this work around:
How to add item transform to VS2012 .proj msbuild file
and tried to implement it, but i can't figure up what i am doing wrong because it's not working as expected.
<CallTarget Targets="CopyOldWebConfigJs" />
<Target Name="CopyOldWebConfigJs"
Inputs="#(ContentFiltered)"
Outputs="%(Identity).Dummy"
DependsOnTargets="webConfigJsCase">
<Message Text="web.config.js Case" />
</Target>
<!-- New target to pre-filter list -->
<Target Name="webConfigJsCase"
Inputs="#(FileToPublish)"
Outputs="%(Identity).Dummy">
<ItemGroup>
<ContentFiltered Condition="$([System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex]::IsMatch('%(FileToPublish.Filename)%(FileToPublish.Extension)', 'web.config.js'))" />
</ItemGroup>
</Target>
I thought that Inputs="#(ContentFiltered)" will contain the lines that DependsOnTargets="webConfigJsCase" find.
But when i run it , i am getting this message: Skipping target "CopyOldWebConfigJs" because it has no inputs.
I know for a fact that the regex work, and it do find a filename_ext that equals web.config.js so it return True
What do i do or understand wrong?

Answer 1

In <ItemGroup><Item/></ItemGroup>, no change will be made to the Item item because no action was specified. If you want to add entries to the item, you must specify Include="".
The <Item/> documentation describes the various attributes for item elements inside of an <ItemGroup/>. Note that at the top-level of an MSBuild file, directly under the <Project/> element, you would use the attributes Include and Exclude while in a <Target/> you would use the attributes Include and Remove. Not including any attributes at all is nonsensical and—as far as I know—no different than simply deleting the entire line. I am surprised MSBuild doesn’t throw an error or warning this is almost certainly a mistake and not intentional.
The Inputs and Outputs attributes on your <Target Name="webConfigJsCase"/> are unnecessary. In fact, they slow MSBuild down by making it loop over the target unnecessarily. You can filter just in the <Item/> like this:
<Target Name="webConfigJsCase">
<ItemGroup>
<ContentFiltered Condition="'%(FileToPublish.Filename)%(FileToPublish.Extension)' == 'web.config.js'" Include="#(FileToPublish)" />
</ItemGroup>
</Target>
Additionally, I assume that you intended your regular expression to match web.config.js but not match webaconfigbjs. You don’t need to use an advanced feature like Regular Expressions here because MSBuild’s built-in condition operators already support simple string comparison. If fixed the condition above to be more readable.