It’s not my code! I googled it.

Actually this blog post is not about Google. And it is even not about copying code. But it is indeed about code which I did not write.

Since a couple days we use SonarQube to check our code for coding style or conventions violations. Well this is not that new. We used to use Checkstyle, PMD, Findbugs already for a couple of years. But the switch to Sonar brought the heap of violations in our code up my mind again. Sonar says we have around 3000-5000 violations in our projects. Probably the most of them are eligible. But some of them are not:

Here you see some of the violations found in the Configuration class in the equals() method. Nearly each line has a violation. The problem is: equals() is a automatically generated method. Coding conventions violations in generated code are just useless. Generated code doesn’t has to be maintainable. It doesn’t has to be readable.

I thought about how to tell Sonar to ignore this code. One could use the //NOSONAR comment to make Sonar ignore lines. But you’d have to place it on every line. Or you could use

@SuppressWarnings("all")

but this would suppress all warnings, not only Sonar violations (reference).

Then I stumbled upon @Generated annotation which is part of Java since 1.6. Using this annotation, code generators could automatically mark generated code, making life easier for code analyzers and developers. So in a perfect world my Eclipse code generator would generate this method:

@Override
@Generated("Eclipse source generator")
public boolean equals(final Object obj) {
    if (this == obj) return true;
    if (obj == null) return false;
    if (getClass() != obj.getClass()) return false;
    final ConfigurationBase other = (ConfigurationBase) obj;
    if (autoRefreshDatabaseEnabled != other.autoRefreshDatabaseEnabled) return false;
    ....
}

and all code analyzers would magically ignore this method.

This idea was already picked up by the sonar team. But sadly it’s not yet implemented.

Update: The issue is fixed now. @Generated methods are ignored since SonarQube Java plugin 4.9.