Handling individual document attributes when publishing with Ant

[Peter Desjardins <peter.desjardins.us@gmail.com>]

Hi, I'm getting started with Apache Ant and DocBook publishing. I have
figured out how to use Ant to transform DocBook files with the
stylesheets. Now I'm trying to find an efficient, maintainable, and
scalable way to handle the sets of attributes that are unique to
documents.

I am dealing with about 40 documents and each one has a set of values
that I need to pass in when they are published. For example, each
document has a docid for olinking, a document title that appears in
Eclipse output, an output filename, and similar details that I need to
control while publishing.

In the past, I've stored all these details in a crude database that I
read with my publishing shell scripts. I'm moving to Ant in an effort
to make the publishing process more easily understandable and
maintainable. Can you point me to a good way to handle these document
attributes when DocBook publishing with Ant? I didn't see the way this
is handled in the DocBook/Ant examples I've found on the web.

Thanks for your help.

Peter