violation suppression scope

[Kym Eden-Jones]

Hi all,

I'm tring to find a way to remove some correctly identitifed but non-addressable warnings, mostly with the Law of Demeter. Certain libraries like Mokito and Guice use chain calls by design:

when(mockedClass.function()).thenReturn(someValue);

and

filter("/*").through(AuthenticationFilter.class);
serve("/js/*", "/css/*").with(CustomFileServlet.class);

for example.

The lines themselves can't be annotated with @SuppressWarning("PMD.LawOfDemeter") and doing so would rapidly make the code less readable. Annotating the method or class means violations in other places are suppressed and //NOPMD suppresses all warnings on a line not just the Law of Demeter one.

Is there no way to make suppressViolationXpath match only the scope of the element identified. For example

//BlockStatement//PrimaryPrefix/Name[@Image='filter' or @Image='serve']

should capture just the offending line, not the whole class.

(Also as a foot note: from the documentation it's really not obvious that suppressViolationXpath affects the whole class if any lines are matched)

[Kym Eden-Jones]

The problem is with ParametericRuleViolation.setSuppression()

if (!suppressed) {  // XPath
            String xpath = rule.getProperty(Rule.VIOLATION_SUPPRESS_XPATH_DESCRIPTOR);
            if (xpath != null) {
                suppressed = node.hasDescendantMatchingXPath(xpath);
            }
        }

should surely be

if (!suppressed) {  // XPath
            String xpath = rule.getProperty(Rule.VIOLATION_SUPPRESS_XPATH_DESCRIPTOR);
            if (xpath != null) {
                suppressed = node.matchesXPath(xpath);
            }
        }

but I'm currently unable to get the git project to build due to all sorts of project and dependency errors in Ecplise so I haven't been able to constrct Node.matchesXPath().