Coding rules mapping

Sonar has its own classification of the coding rules. Currently Sonar manages 5 levels of activation for the rules : blocker, critical, major, minor and info. Since existing coding rules engines use their own levels, this page intends to describe the mapping between those and Sonar levels.

Checkstyle

Checkstyle uses 3 levels of severity : error, warning and info.

Import into Sonar

Checkstyle	Sonar
error	blocker
warning	major
info	info

any rule not present or with an inactive level in the checkstyle.xml file during an import into Sonar will not be activated

Export out of Sonar

Sonar	Checkstyle
blocker or critical	error
major	warning
minor or info	info

any rule not activated in Sonar will not be present in the Checkstyle.xml definition file resulting of an export

PMD

PMD uses 5 levels of priority, from 1 to 5

Import into Sonar

PMD	Sonar
1	blocker
2	critical
3	major
4	minor
5	info

any rule not present in the PMD.xml file during an import into Sonar will not be activated

Export out of Sonar

Sonar	PMD
blocker	1
critical	2
major	3
minor	4
info	5

any rule not activated in Sonar will not be present in the PMD.xml definition file resulting of an export

Findbugs

Findbugs uses 3 levels of priority, from 1 to 3

Import into Sonar

Findbugs	Sonar
1	blocker
2	major
3	info

any rule not present in the Findbugs.xml file during an import into Sonar will not be activated

Export out of Sonar

Logically, here is what we should have...

Sonar	PMD
blocker or critical	1
major	2
minor or info	3

any rule not activated in Sonar will not be present in the Findbugs.xml definition file resulting of an export

However, due to some strange behavior of Findbugs, Sonar does not set any priority in Findbugs when exporting. Otherwise some rules are not working.