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24-January-2020 - 6.21.0

The PMD team is pleased to announce PMD 6.21.0.

This is a minor release.

New and noteworthy

Modelica support

Thanks to Anatoly Trosinenko PMD supports now a new language: Modelica is a language to model complex physical systems. Both PMD and CPD are supported and there are already 3 rules available. The PMD Designer supports syntax highlighting for Modelica.

While the language implementation is quite complete, Modelica support is considered experimental for now. This is to allow us to change the rule API (e.g. the AST classes) slightly and improve the implementation based on your feedback.

Simple XML dump of AST

We added a experimental feature to dump the AST of a source file into XML. The XML format is of course PMD specific and language dependent. That XML file can be used to execute (XPath) queries against without PMD. It can also be used as a textual visualization of the AST if you don’t want to use the Designer.

This feature is experimental and might change or even be removed in the future, if it is not useful. A short description how to use it is available under Creating XML dump of the AST.

Any feedback about it, especially about your use cases, is highly appreciated.

Updated Apex Support

  • The Apex language support has been bumped to version 48 (Spring ‘20). All new language features are now properly parsed and processed.

CPD XML format

The CPD XML output format has been enhanced to also report column information for found duplications in addition to the line information. This allows to display the exact tokens, that are considered duplicate.

If a CPD language doesn’t provide these exact information, then these additional attributes are omitted.

Each <file> element in the XML format now has 3 new attributes:

  • attribute endLine
  • attribute beginColumn (if there is column information available)
  • attribute endColumn (if there is column information available)

Modified Rules

  • The Java rule AvoidLiteralsInIfCondition (java-errorprone) has a new property ignoreExpressions. This property is set by default to true in order to maintain compatibility. If this property is set to false, then literals in more complex expressions are considered as well.

  • The Apex rule ApexCSRF (apex-errorprone) has been moved from category “Security” to “Error Prone”. The Apex runtime already prevents DML statements from being executed, but only at runtime. So, if you try to do this, you’ll get an error at runtime, hence this is error prone. See also the discussion on #2064.

  • The Java rule CommentRequired (java-documentation) has a new property classCommentRequirement. This replaces the now deprecated property headerCommentRequirement, since the name was misleading. (File) header comments are not checked, but class comments are.

Fixed Issues

  • apex
    • #2208: [apex] ASTFormalComment should implement ApexNode<T>
  • core
    • #1984: [java] Cyclomatic complexity is misreported (lack of clearing metrics cache)
    • #2006: [core] PMD should warn about multiple instances of the same rule in a ruleset
    • #2161: [core] ResourceLoader is deprecated and marked as internal but is exposed
    • #2170: [core] DocumentFile doesn’t preserve newlines
  • doc
    • #2214: [doc] Link broken in pmd documentation for writing Xpath rules
  • java
    • #2212: [java] JavaRuleViolation reports wrong class name
  • java-bestpractices
    • #2149: [java] JUnitAssertionsShouldIncludeMessage - False positive with assertEquals and JUnit5
  • java-codestyle
    • #2167: [java] UnnecessaryLocalBeforeReturn false positive with variable captured by method reference
  • java-documentation
    • #1683: [java] CommentRequired property names are inconsistent
  • java-errorprone
    • #2140: [java] AvoidLiteralsInIfCondition: false negative for expressions
    • #2196: [java] InvalidLogMessageFormat does not detect extra parameters when no placeholders
  • java-performance
    • #2141: [java] StringInstatiation: False negative with String-array access
  • plsql
    • #2008: [plsql] In StringLiteral using alternative quoting mechanism single quotes cause parsing errors
    • #2009: [plsql] Multiple DDL commands are skipped during parsing

API Changes

Deprecated APIs

Internal API

Those APIs are not intended to be used by clients, and will be hidden or removed with PMD 7.0.0. You can identify them with the @InternalApi annotation. You’ll also get a deprecation warning.

For removal

External Contributions