Question

I have configured my Eclipse to use a remote checkstyle configuration that is located on a server, which I reach via HTTP. This works fine, but the configuration contains:

<module name="SuppressionFilter">
<property name="file" value="${basedir}/checkstyle-filter.xml"/>
</module>

So I try to set an additional property “basedir” which points to the same directory where the configuration is. When I try to run checkstyle on a project I get an error: cannot initialize module SuppressionsFilter – Cannot set property ‘file’ in module SuppressionFilter to ‘http://“my Url “/checkstyle-filter.xml’

Any suggestions on how to configure Eclipse to use the checkstyle configuration from the server even though it has that it contains the SuppressionFilter? I do not want to put a checkstyle-filter in each project…

Answer 1

This is currently not possible as reported in Remote Configuration Files cannot use a SuppressionFilter – ID: 2018081. Actually, the problem is in Checkstyle which uses a java.io.File object for the external SuppressionFilter file (and thus setting a value starting with http:// won’t work). There is a feature request on Checkstyle to change this (see Allow remote references to additional file configuration – ID: 2018608). But don’t expect these changes to occur very soon (unless if you start working hard on it 🙂

That being said, while I perfectly understand the need for a corporate wide checkstyle configuration file, I’m more surprised by the need for a shared SuppressionFilter file. After all, its content is project specific, isn’t it? So, I think that you should actually use another property, for example ${workspace} (or your own property, my understanding of Expanding property placeholders is that using a .properties file is supposed to work with a Remote Configuration too) and ask each project to provide its own file with its SuppressionFilter that would be referenced from the workspace. Based on convention, that should work.