title: Is there a way to set the Maven version number dynamically?
body: <p>I would like to use Maven to produce an artifact in zip format. To give you some background; my project includes an APS package (Application Packaging Standard, used to provision cloud applications on the Parallels platform). This package is a zip file that contains a combination of XML as well as PHP files. It is generated by an APS plugin from within Eclipse and its name always includes the version and release number of its contents. </p>
  
  <p>What I am trying to do is generate a zip file with Maven that would be kind of a release candidate that will be eventually sent to customers and would include not only the actual APS package but also other files such as README, User Guide.pdf, etc;. I would like the name of this zip file to contain the version number of the version number of the APS package. Currently I can generate this manually by using something like "mvn -Dversion=1.2.3-4 package" but I would like to automate the process and ideally run this from Jenkins. </p>
  
  <p>Basically, my strategy is to run a script that would extract the version number from the initial APS package, once that is done, my script can invoke Maven and can pass this parameter to it so it can generate the final zip with the proper version number. This is fine but again, I need to run this script manually and I am looking for an automated process.</p>
  
  <p>My question is; is it possible to invoke this script from within Maven and use its return as a parameter to set the version name (or the name of the file that will be generated) at run time? As I mentioned, I would like eventually Jenkins to handle this. It can pick up the pom file but I am not sure how it could kind of "auto configure" itself to have the proper version number.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks is advance.</p>