Learn how to write a custom rule for PMD
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This page covers the specifics of writing a rule in Java. The basic development process is very similar to the process for XPath rules, which is described in Your First Rule.

Basically, you open the designer, look at the structure of the AST, and refine your rule as you add test cases.

In this page we’ll talk about rules for the Java language, but the process is very similar for other languages.

Basics

To write a rule in Java you’ll have to:

  1. write a Java class that implements the interface Rule. Each language implementation provides a base rule class to ease your pain, e.g. AbstractJavaRule.
  2. compile this class, linking it to PMD APIs (eg using PMD as a maven dependency)
  3. bundle this into a JAR and add it to the execution classpath of PMD
  4. declare the rule in your ruleset XML

Rule execution

Most base rule classes use a Visitor pattern to explore the AST.

Tree traversal

When a rule is applied to a file, it’s handed the root of the AST and told to traverse all the tree to look for violations. Each rule defines a specific visit method for each type of node for of the language, which by default just visits the children.

So the following rule would traverse the whole tree and do nothing:

public class MyRule extends AbstractJavaRule {
    // all methods are default implementations!
}

Generally, a rule wants to check for only some node types. In our XPath example in Your First Rule, we wanted to check for some VariableDeclaratorId nodes. That’s the XPath name, but in Java, you’ll get access to the ASTVariableDeclaratorId full API.

If you want to check for some specific node types, you can override the corresponding visit method:

public class MyRule extends AbstractJavaRule {

    @Override
    public Object visit(ASTVariableDeclaratorId node, Object data) {
        // This method is called on each node of type ASTVariableDeclaratorId
        // in the AST

        if (node.getType() == short.class) {
            // reports a violation at the position of the node
            // the "data" parameter is a context object handed to by your rule
            // the message for the violation is the message defined in the rule declaration XML element
            addViolation(data, node);
        }

        // this calls back to the default implementation, which recurses further down the subtree
        return super.visit(node, data);
    }
}

The super.visit(node, data) call is super common in rule implementations, because it makes the traversal continue by visiting all the descendants of the current node.

Stopping the traversal

Sometimes you have checked all you needed and you’re sure that the descendants of a node may not contain violations. In that case, you can avoid calling the super implementation and the traversal will not continue further down. This means that your callbacks (visit implementations) won’t be called on the rest of the subtree. The siblings of the current node may be visited recursively nevertheless.

Economic traversal: the rulechain

If you don’t care about the order in which the nodes are traversed (e.g. your rule doesn’t maintain any state between visits), then you can monumentally speed-up your rule by using the rulechain.

That mechanism doesn’t recurse on all the tree, instead, your rule will only be passed the nodes it is interested in. To use the rulechain correctly:

  • Your rule must register those node types by calling addRuleChainVisit in its constructor.
  • Your visit methods must not recurse! In effect, you should call never call super.visit in the methods.

Execution across files, thread-safety and statefulness

When starting execution, PMD will instantiate a new instance of your rule. If PMD is executed in multiple threads, then each thread is using its own instance of the rule. This means, that the rule implementation does not need to care about threading issues, as PMD makes sure, that a single instance is not used concurrently by multiple threads.

However, for performance reasons, the rule instances are used for multiple files. This means, that the constructor of the rule is only executed once (per thread) and the rule instance is reused. If you rely on a proper initialization of instance properties, you can do the initialization e.g. in the visit-method of the ASTCompilationUnit node - which is visited first and only once per file. However, this solution would only work for rules written for the Java language. A language independent way is to override the method start of the rule. The start method is called exactly once per file.

Rule lifecycle reference

Construction

Exactly once:

  1. The rule’s no-arg constructor is called when loading the ruleset. The rule’s constructor must define:
  2. If the rule was included in the ruleset as a rule reference, some properties may be overridden. If an overridden property is unknown, an error is reported.
  3. Misconfigured rules are removed from the ruleset

Execution

For each thread, a deep copy of the rule is created. Each thread is given a different set of files to analyse. Then, for each such file, for each rule copy:

  1. start is called once, before parsing
  2. apply is called with the root of the AST. That method performs the AST traversal that ultimately calls visit methods. It’s not called for RuleChain rules.
  3. end is called when the rule is done processing the file
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