There is an "xmlproperty" task, but using that will probably give you properties that look like "blah.name=DB_DRIVER" and "blah.value=...", where I imagine you are wanting a single property of "DB_DRIVER=..." instead. Not being fluent with xmlproperty itself, I would write a little XSLT file to convert the external xml file into a standard properties file format, use a standard "xslt" ant task to run the transform, then use a standard "property file=..." ant task to pull that into ant. Then again, I write a lot of XSLT lately.