Parsing Exclusions
The grammar for PLSQL used in PMD has several bugs and might not parse all DDL scripts without errors. However, it should be best practice to call PMD for every DDL script. Thus, we introduce the following workaround to cope with the situation.
We introduce two special comments PMD-EXCLUDE-BEGIN
and PMD-EXCLUDE-END
which cause PMD to treat the source in between these comments more or less
like a multi-line comment, or in other words, just not try to parse them.
It is good practice to include a reason for excluding inside the
-- PMD-EXCUDE-BEGIN
comment separated by a colon.
The PMD-EXCLUDE-BEGIN
and PMD-EXLUDE-END
comment lines must not contain
other statements, e.g. do_xy(); -- PMD-EXCLUDE-BEGIN
is invalid.
Example:
begin
do_something();
-- PMD-EXCLUDE-BEGIN: PMD does not like dbms_lob.trim (clash with TrimExpression)
dbms_lob.trim(the_blob, 1000);
-- PMD-EXCLUDE-END
do_something_else();
end;
The existence of exclusions can be detected with the attributes
ExcludedRangesCount
and ExcludedLinesCount
of the top-level ASTInput node.
If nothing is excluded, both values are 0 (zero).
Otherwise, ExcludedRangesCount
contains the number of excluded line-ranges
and ExcludedLinesCount
is the total number of excluded lines.
A future version of PMD might pass the line excluded line ranges,
source fragments and the corresponding reason comments
as child nodes of the top-level ASTInput node.
In order to keep track where such parse exclusions are used, you could create a custom XPath rule with the following expression:
/Input[@ExcludedRangesCount > 0]
This will find all files with at least one excluded range.