Question

I try do the following:

1. I have a standard POM defined for all my Maven2 projects.
2. That POM includes the tools to use, and for PMD the rulesets to use.
3. I have defined a property that names these rulesets each.

Up to know this is working. I can define a new project POM, use there as parent my standard POM, and use the rulesets there defined. I am even able to override the definition of the property that defines the ruleset by another name.

I have defined that as auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml instead of pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml (which is then choosen by Maven2) and have included the file auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml locally in my new project (under src/main/resources). But Maven does not find it. The error messages look like that:

[DEBUG] Preparing ruleset: auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml

[DEBUG] Before: auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml After: auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml

[DEBUG] The resource ‘auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml’ was not found with resourceLoader org.codehaus.plexus.resource.loa
der.FileResourceLoader.

[DEBUG] The resource ‘auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml’ was not found with resourceLoader org.codehaus.plexus.resource.loa
der.JarResourceLoader.

[DEBUG] The resource ‘auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml’ was not found with resourceLoader org.codehaus.plexus.resource.loa
der.ThreadContextClasspathResourceLoader.

[DEBUG] URLResourceLoader: Exception when looking for ‘auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml’ at ”
java.net.MalformedURLException: no protocol: auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml

Is there any technique available to reach what I want? I want to redefine the ruleset PMD should use without repeating the whole definition of everything.

Answer 1

Based on the error message, it looks like you may not have specified the full path to your custom rule-set auth-pmd-rule-set-3.x-v1-5.xml in your pom. As per the docs,

The rule sets may reside in the
classpath, filesystem or at a URL. For
rule sets that are bundled with the
PMD tool, you do not need to specificy
the absolute path of the file. It will
be resolved by the plugin. But if the
rule set is a custom rule set, you
need to specify its absolute path.