PMD 6.27.0 released

31 August 2020

31-August-2020 - 6.27.0

The PMD team is pleased to announce PMD 6.27.0.

This is a minor release.

Table Of Contents

New and noteworthy

Java 15 Support

This release of PMD brings support for Java 15. PMD can parse Text Blocks which have been promoted to be a standard language feature of Java.

PMD also supports Pattern Matching for instanceof, Records, and Sealed Classes.

Note: The Pattern Matching for instanceof, Records, and Sealed Classes are all preview language features of OpenJDK 15 and are not enabled by default. In order to analyze a project with PMD that uses these language features, you’ll need to enable it via the environment variable PMD_JAVA_OPTS and select the new language version 15-preview:

export PMD_JAVA_OPTS=--enable-preview
./run.sh pmd -language java -version 15-preview ...

Note: Support for Java 13 preview language features have been removed. The version “13-preview” is no longer available.

Changes in how tab characters are handled

In the past, tab characters in source files has been handled differently in different languages by PMD. For instance in Java, tab characters had a width of 8 columns, while C# used only 1 column. Visualforce instead used 4 columns.

This has been unified now so that tab characters are consistently now always 1 column wide.

This however might be a incompatible change, if you’re using the properties “BeginColumn” or “EndColumn” additionally to “BeginLine” and “EndLine” of a Token/AST node in order to highlight where a rule violation occurred in the source file. If you have logic there that deals with tab characters, you most likely can remove this logic now, since tab characters are now just “normal” characters in terms of string processing.

See also [all] Ensure PMD/CPD uses tab width of 1 for tabs consistently #2656.

Updated PMD Designer

This PMD release ships a new version of the pmd-designer. For the changes, see PMD Designer Changelog.

New Rules

  • The new Java rule AvoidReassigningCatchVariables (java-bestpractices) finds cases where the variable of the caught exception is reassigned. This practice is surprising and prevents further evolution of the code like multi-catch.

Modified Rules

  • The Java rule CloseResource (java-errorprone) has a new property closeNotInFinally. With this property set to true the rule will also find calls to close a resource, which are not in a finally-block of a try-statement. If a resource is not closed within a finally block, it might not be closed at all in case of exceptions.

    As this new detection would yield many new violations, it is disabled by default. It might be enabled in a later version of PMD.

Deprecated Rules

Fixed Issues

  • core
    • #724: [core] Avoid parsing rulesets multiple times
    • #1962: [core] Simplify Report API
    • #2653: [lang-test] Upgrade kotlintest to Kotest
    • #2656: [all] Ensure PMD/CPD uses tab width of 1 for tabs consistently
    • #2690: [core] Fix java7 compatibility
  • java
    • #2646: [java] Support JDK 15
  • java-bestpractices
    • #2471: [java] New Rule: AvoidReassigningCatchVariables
    • #2663: [java] NoClassDefFoundError on upgrade from 6.25.0 to 6.26.0
    • #2668: [java] UnusedAssignment false positives
    • #2673: [java] UnusedPrivateField and SingularField false positive with lombok annotation EqualsAndHashCode
    • #2684: [java] UnusedAssignment FP in try/catch
    • #2686: [java] UnusedAssignment must not flag abstract method parameters in interfaces and abstract classes
  • java-design
    • #2108: [java] [doc] ImmutableField rule: Description should clarify shallow immutability
    • #2461: [java] ExcessiveParameterListRule must ignore a private constructor
  • java-errorprone
    • #2264: [java] SuspiciousEqualsMethodName: Improve description about error-prone overloading of equals()
    • #2410: [java] ProperCloneImplementation not valid for final class
    • #2431: [java] InvalidLogMessageFormatRule throws IndexOutOfBoundsException when only logging exception message
    • #2439: [java] AvoidCatchingThrowable can not detect the case: catch (java.lang.Throwable t)
    • #2470: [java] CloseResource false positive when resource included in return value
    • #2531: [java] UnnecessaryCaseChange can not detect the case like: foo.equals(bar.toLowerCase())
    • #2647: [java] Deprecate rule DataFlowAnomalyAnalysis
  • java-performance
    • #1868: [java] false-positive for SimplifyStartsWith if string is empty
    • #2441: [java] RedundantFieldInitializer can not detect a special case for char initialize: char foo = '\0';
    • #2530: [java] StringToString can not detect the case: getStringMethod().toString()
  • dart
    • #2750: [dart] [cpd] Cpd Dart escaped dollar

API Changes

  • XML rule definition in rulesets: In PMD 7, the language attribute will be required on all rule elements that declare a new rule. Some base rule classes set the language implicitly in their constructor, and so this is not required in all cases for the rule to work. But this behavior will be discontinued in PMD 7, so missing language attributes are now reported as a forward compatibility warning.

Deprecated API

For removal

External Contributions

Stats

  • 189 commits
  • 68 closed tickets & PRs
  • Days since last release: 37