Invoking FindBugs from Ant: passing a space-separated list of files to java

Question

I'm trying to invoke FindBugs from inside Ant. In order to control the amount of memory available to FindBugs, I've chosen not to use the ant-task. The problem I have now is that I want to pass a number of jars on the command-line to FindBugs:

java -jar .../findbugs.jar foo.jar bar.jar fie.jar

However, since these jars actually are Eclipse plugins, I don't know the exact name of the jars so I need a way to use a wildcard to obtain the list. This is what I've come up with:

<target name="findbugs">
 <property name="findbugs.home" location="${user.home}/eclipse/findbugs" />
 <path id="findbugs.input">
  <fileset dir="${testDirectory}/eclipse/plugins">
   <include name="my.plugins.*.jar" />
  </fileset>
 </path>
 <path id="findbugs.auxinput">
  <fileset dir="${testDirectory}/eclipse/plugins">
   <include name="*.jar" />
   <include name="**/*.jar" />
  </fileset>
 </path>
 <java jar="${findbugs.home}/lib/findbugs.jar" fork="true">
  <jvmarg value="-Xmx1048m" />
  <arg value="-textui" />
  <arg value="-output" />
  <arg value="findbugs.xml" />
  <arg value="-xml" />
  <arg value="-exclude" />
  <arg value="${basedir}/findbugsExclude.xml" />
  <arg value="-auxclasspath" />
  <arg pathref="findbugs.auxinput"/>
  <arg pathref="findbugs.input" />
 </java>
</target>

However, the findbugs.input pathref is a comma-separated list of jars, and not space-separated as FindBugs wants it. How do I get the list of jars as a space-separated list?

(Is this perhaps easier to do with the FindBugs ant-task. I can't really tell from the documentation.)

Answer 1

Use <pathconvert> to convert the path into the proper format, storing it into a property then use <arg value...> instead of <arg pathref...>

Answer 2

Use pathconvert, like this:

 <pathconvert pathsep="," property="findbugs.input.csv" refid="findbugs.input"/>

Implementing in the target that you provided, I changed the reference from <arg pathref="findbugs.input" /> to <arg value="${findbugs.input.csv}" />

 <target name="findbugs">
 <property name="findbugs.home" location="${user.home}/eclipse/findbugs" />
    <path id="findbugs.input">
        <fileset dir="${testDirectory}/eclipse/plugins">
            <include name="my.plugins.*.jar" />
        </fileset>
    </path>
    <pathconvert pathsep="," property="findbugs.input.csv" refid="findbugs.input"/>

    <path id="findbugs.auxinput">
        <fileset dir="${testDirectory}/eclipse/plugins">
            <include name="*.jar" />
            <include name="**/*.jar" />
        </fileset>
    </path>

    <echo message="${findbugs.input.csv}" />

    <java jar="${findbugs.home}/lib/findbugs.jar" fork="true">
        <jvmarg value="-Xmx1048m" />
        <arg value="-textui" />
        <arg value="-output" />
        <arg value="findbugs.xml" />
        <arg value="-xml" />
        <arg value="-exclude" />
        <arg value="${basedir}/findbugsExclude.xml" />
        <arg value="-auxclasspath" />
        <arg pathref="findbugs.auxinput"/>
        <arg value="${findbugs.input.csv}" />
    </java>
    </target>

Answer 3

You can control the memory from the ant task:

    <findbugs   jvmargs="-Xms512m -Xmx512m" ...>
      ...
   </findbugs>