Live example If you want to see a live example of the capabilities of the Flex plugin, you can have a look at the analysis of the AS3 Core Lib project on Nemo.

Description / Features

The plugin enables analysis of ActionScript projects within Sonar.

It is compatible with the Issues Report plugin to run pre-commit local analysis.

Installation

1. Install the Flex plugin through the Update Center or download it into the SONAR_HOME/extensions/plugins directory
2. Restart the Sonar server

Usage

Run a Sonar Analysis with the Sonar Runner (Recommended Way)

To launch a Sonar analysis of your Flex project, use the Sonar Runner.

A sample project is available on github that can be browsed or downloaded: /projects/languages/flex/flex-sonar-runner.

Run a Sonar Analysis with the other Analyzers

Maven and Ant can also be used to launch analysis on Flex projects.

Unit Tests an Code Coverage Reports

If you want to have unit test results in your Sonar dashboard, execute your unit tests before running the Sonar analysis and use the "sonar.dynamicAnalysis=reuseReports" property along with the "sonar.surefire.reportsPath" one to specify where Sonar should retrieve the XML reports.

You can provide the path to the code coverage report (in cobertura xml format) using the "sonar.cobertura.reportPath" property (the value must point to the file location, not its folder).

Metrics

See Metrics documentation page.

Extending Coding Rules using XPath

New coding rules can be added using XPath. See the related documentation.

To navigate the AST, download the SSLR Flex Toolkit.

Troubleshooting

FlexPMD engine - that is embedded in the Flex plugin, suffers from some bugs which can break Sonar analyses. Here are some of them you might encounter if FlexPMD rules are activated in the Flex quality profile that you are using:

• "fb:purpose="styling" attribute in MXML files causes OutOfMemory errors (see SONARPLUGINS-2400). 
  
  • Removing it fixes the issue.

• the following code snippet make FlexPMD engine crash:
  
  • in MXML files:

• • in AS files:

Change Log

Version 1.2 (29 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-2048	Upgrade to SSLR 1.14
	SONARPLUGINS-2076	Support ActionScript 2
	SONARPLUGINS-2072	Unable to parse some files
	SONARPLUGINS-1999	Rule: Functions shall have a single point of exit at the end of the function
	SONARPLUGINS-2181	Make the Flex plugin support the Developer Cockpit plugin by providing the measures comments and loc by line
	SONARPLUGINS-2214	Prevent conflicts in l10n of description for Flex rules
	SONARPLUGINS-2211	Embed the sonar-common-rules library
	SONARPLUGINS-2206	Flex grammar is incorrect
	SONARPLUGINS-2207	flex pmd mxml file incorrectly identifies script and metadata blocks
	SONARPLUGINS-2199	Remove metric comment_blank_lines
	SONARPLUGINS-2195	Grammar: incorrect AST for expression statement "b = a- 1" (no space between identifier and minus)
	SONARPLUGINS-2281	Severity of rule CommentedCode should be major by default, but not blocker
	SONARPLUGINS-2280	Rule NestedIfDepthCheck should not produce false-positive in case of 'if-else-if'
	SONARPLUGINS-2279	Grammar: ActionScript 3 syntactic keywords can be used as identifiers
	SONARPLUGINS-2277	Labelled statement should not be included into metric 'statements'
	SONARPLUGINS-2275	Grammar: support "set variable" statement
	SONARPLUGINS-2272	Grammar: Should be possible to use keyword as a name of xml node or attribute
	SONARPLUGINS-2273	Grammar: Should be possible to use xml namespaces
	SONARPLUGINS-2274	Grammar: support "intrinsic" keyword
	SONARPLUGINS-2271	Grammar: "include" / "import" and "use namespace" directives can be used as a statement
	SONARPLUGINS-2270	Grammar: semicolon can be omitted at the end of import/use namespace/include as for any other statement
	SONARPLUGINS-2252	Rule: Do not use statements, operators and keywords specific to ActionScript 2
	SONARPLUGINS-2251	Grammar: support deprecated operators
	SONARPLUGINS-2247	Provide new version of sslr-flex-toolkit instead of flex-devkit
	SONARPLUGINS-2246	Grammar: xml binding should be allowed for tag name and for attribute
	SONARPLUGINS-2245	Rule: SwitchWithoutDefault should check that default-clause is the last one
	SONARPLUGINS-2244	Grammar: switch statement requires default case to be last but should be allowed at any position
	SONARPLUGINS-2238	Rule: An unconditional break statement shall terminate every non-empty switch-clause
	SONARPLUGINS-2237	Typo in description of Flex XPath rule

Version 1.1 (26 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-670	Different number of violations reported on different OSs
	SONARPLUGINS-793	Maven Sonar goal will not execute
	SONARPLUGINS-959	Remove dependency on Maven
	SONARPLUGINS-922	In mutiproject fails when it trying run PMD on the parent POM
	SONARPLUGINS-1938	Rule: Avoid switch statement without a "default" clause
	SONARPLUGINS-1928	Rule: Detect commented-out lines of code
	SONARPLUGINS-1927	Rule: Avoid too complex file
	SONARPLUGINS-1920	Rule: Regular expression on comment
	SONARPLUGINS-1918	Rule: Avoid deeply nested if statements
	SONARPLUGINS-1917	Rule: One statement per line
	SONARPLUGINS-1915	Rule: Avoid too complex method
	SONARPLUGINS-1916	Rule: Avoid usage of with statement
	SONARPLUGINS-1835	Provide a default SQALE mapping for the Flex rules
	SONARPLUGINS-1910	Rule: When there is a parsing error, this error should be added like a violation on that Flex file
	SONARPLUGINS-1911	Provide "Sonar Way" profile for Flex
	SONARPLUGINS-1914	Rule: Avoid too complex class
	SONARPLUGINS-1913	Metric: statements
	SONARPLUGINS-1919	Rule: Line too long
	SONARPLUGINS-1912	Metric: blank comments
	SONARPLUGINS-1907	Provide Flex rule engine based on SSLR
	SONARPLUGINS-1906	Integrate Flex parser based on SSLR
	SONARPLUGINS-1905	Rule: Generic Flex rule to define some homemade checks with an XPath expression
	SONARPLUGINS-1708	On Flex projects, replace the "distribution of complexity by class" by the "distribution of complexity by file"
	SONARPLUGINS-1762	Unable to reuse existing coverage report for Flex project
	SONARPLUGINS-1531	LOC counter is broken
	SONARPLUGINS-1785	Update default Flex PMD rules

Version 1.0.1 (2 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-1732	Downgrade the requirement from JDK 1.6 to 1.5
	SONARPLUGINS-1597	Unable to use Sonar Flex Plugin with Java 7

Version 1.0 (12 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-424	Replace FlexCpd by Sonar CPD
	SONARPLUGINS-316	Add the ability to exclude sources
	SONARPLUGINS-745	Confusing Flex PMD rules name
	SONARPLUGINS-903	Add support for MXML files
	SONARPLUGINS-1667	Make the Flex plugin compatible with SCM activity plugin
	SONARPLUGINS-1666	Refactor resource handling to use standard API
	SONARPLUGINS-1685	An unnamed folder appears if at least one source file is in the base source directory
	SONARPLUGINS-1559	Cross project duplication detection for Flex
	SONARPLUGINS-1623	Should be possible to use dollars in class names
	SONARPLUGINS-1600	Capability to make difference between message and name of a rule
	SONARPLUGINS-1355	Sonar doesn't support inner classes in a Java Flex application
	SONARPLUGINS-1062	Ability to view source for MXML files

Version 0.4 (3 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-310	Should use Stax instead of XPath to process the FlexMetrics xml
	SONARPLUGINS-753	Migrate to new rules api
	SONARPLUGINS-540	Ability to reuse an existing coverage reports for Flex projects

Version 0.3.1 (1 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-741	Use surefire parser provided by sonar-surefire-plugin

Version 0.3 (8 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-490	Add the ability to override Duplications parameters
	SONARPLUGINS-425	minimumTokenCount parameter does not seem to be taken into account
	SONARPLUGINS-452	Upgrade to FlexCPD 1.1
	SONARPLUGINS-312	Integrate FlexUnit
	SONARPLUGINS-496	Looks like FlexMetrics does not count properly static methods
	SONARPLUGINS-669	Migrate to sonar-dev-maven-plugin from sonar-dev-mojo for integration tests
	SONARPLUGINS-666	Test files incorrectly handled by FlexSourceImporter
	SONARPLUGINS-623	Update the plugin to FlexPMD / FlexCPD / FlexMetrics 1.2

Version 0.2 (1 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-544	Make the plugin compatible with Sonar 2.2

Version 0.1 (11 issues)
Type	Key	Summary	Priority
	SONARPLUGINS-309	Comments are not calculated
	SONARPLUGINS-429	Plugin Fails after running cpd
	SONARPLUGINS-426	Issue when package names contain AS
	SONARPLUGINS-447	Add the possibility to chosse files extensions to analyze
	SONARPLUGINS-435	Nullpointer in FlexCpdMavenSensor.java:152
	SONARPLUGINS-382	The plugin crashes on multimodule project that do not have source code in the root module
	SONARPLUGINS-311	Integrate FlexPMD
	SONARPLUGINS-308	Integrate FlexMetrics
	SONARPLUGINS-307	Create a plugin to analyze ActionScript
	SONARPLUGINS-318	A class that has no package does not get reported in Sonar
	SONARPLUGINS-327	Integrate CPD to report on duplications