Monthly Archives: October 2014

Analyzing Xtend code with Sonarqube

I recently started to play with Sonarqube to reduce “technical debt” and hopefully improve code quality (see my previous post). I’d like to report on my experiences about using Sonarqube to analyze Xtend code.

Xtend compiles into Java source code, so it looks like it is trivial to analyze it with Sonarqube; of course, Sonarqube will analyze the generated Java code, but it’s rather easy to refer to the original Xtend code, since Xtend generates clean Java code 🙂

However, we Sonarqube 4.4 it looks like it’s harder than I thought due to some facts:

My starting point was another issue: test results did not show in the Sonarqube 4.4 web interface, and that was because test detection has changed in version 4 (http://sonarqube.15.x6.nabble.com/quot-Unit-test-success-quot-in-Sonarqube-4-4-td5028019.html).

I created an example to reproduce the problem and propose a solution: https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/tycho-xtend-sonar.

In the parent project we specify the actual project with sources to be analyzed, and the project containing tests (in this example I also use jacoco for code coverage, but that’s not crucial for this example):

And we enable all the Maven plug-ins for

The plugin and the plugin.tests projects intentionally contain Xtend and Java files with some Findbugs issues, e.g.,

Now, assuming you have Sonarqube 4.4 running on your machine, you can run the typical maven commands to analyze your code (make sure you set the MaxPermSize in the MAVEN_OPTS otherwise the Xtend compiler will run out of memory):

If you go to Sonarqube web interface you see

sonarqube xtend 1So you see that Sonarqube correctly detected Findbugs issues in all the Java files, but for the Java code generated by Xtend, it only detected the issues in the plugin.tests project, not on the plugin project (as explained here http://sonarqube.15.x6.nabble.com/sonarqube-findbugs-and-generated-sources-td5028237.html, Sonarqube does “not take into consideration this suppress warnings annotation in test files”).

To deal with this problem, I created an ant file which basically removes all the @SuppressWarnings(“all”) annotations in all the generated Java files in the xtend-gen folder:

and I created a Maven profile in the parent pom that, when activated, invokes the ant target, in the process-sources phase (recall that this phase is executed after generate-sources phase, when the Xtend files are compiled into Java code)

Now, let’s invoke the two maven commands, but this time, the first one activates the above profile

OK, let’s go to the “Issues Drilldown” in the Sonarqube web interface and this time the issues are detected also in the plugin project:

sonarqube xtend 2You may want to select “Since previous analysis” in the combo box, to make sure that this analysis detected these new issues:

sonarqube xtend 3

Hope this helps! 🙂

The source code can be found here: https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/tycho-xtend-sonar.