Enable Capture/Replay for Selenium Flex

One of the missing features of the SeleniumFlexAPI was capture/replay. So I looked into different ways to enable it:

  • Approach 1: Dispatch a DOM event and listen for it in ide-extensions.js

    Problem: Where do I include the name/id of the Flex control?
  • Approach 2: Custom events

    Problem: How do I listen to them in ide-extensions.js?

Solution: Additions to the Selenium IDE code: window.record

The solution is to add a new method to the Selenium IDE code: window.record which delegates to recorder.record. So that the Flex code can call this method directly through the ExternalInterface. The clear advantage of this technique is that there is no code pollution in your production code. But you have to change the SeleniumIDE code. There is an issue in the SeleniumIDE Jira which describes the additions, so go and vote for it!
Addtional code is also needed in the SeleniumFlexAPI.as in the applicationCompleteHandler:

private function applicationCompleteHandler(event:FlexEvent):void {
  ...
  registerListeners(appTreeParser.thisApp.parent);
  ...
}
private function registerListeners(subject:*):void {
  subject.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, recordClick);
  subject.addEventListener(MouseEvent.DOUBLE_CLICK, recordDoubleClick);
  subject.addEventListener(Event.ADDED, childAdded);
  addListenerRecursive(subject);
}

Bubbling events like MouseEvent.CLICK can be added here but for the non-bubbling ones you have to recursively walk the displayobject hierarchy:

public function addListenerRecursive(root:*):void {
  for(var i:int = 0; i < root.numChildren; i++) {
    try {
      var child:Object = root.getChildAt(i);
      if (isMenuBar(child)) {
        child.removeEventListener(MenuEvent.ITEM_CLICK, recordMenuItemClick);
        child.addEventListener(MenuEvent.ITEM_CLICK, recordMenuItemClick);
      }
      if (isTextControl(child)) {
        child.removeEventListener(Event.CHANGE, recordTextChange);
        child.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, recordTextChange);
      }
      if (isDataGrid(child)) {
        child.removeEventListener(DataGridEvent.ITEM_FOCUS_IN, recordItemClick);
        child.addEventListener(DataGridEvent.ITEM_FOCUS_IN, recordItemClick);
      }
      addListenerRecursive(child);
    } catch(e:Error) {}
  }
}

In the event handling functions you just call the record function with the appropiate SeleniumFlex command:

private function recordClick(event:MouseEvent):void {
  ExternalInterface.call("record", "flexClick", "name=" + event.target.name, "");
}

Since Flex Sprites have no ids I use the name here for identifying the clicked target.
Another pitfall is when components are added dynamically (like when a Date opens, it adds a calendar view):

private function childAdded(event:Event):void {
  if (isDate(event.target.parent.parent)) {
    event.target.parent.parent.removeEventListener(CalendarLayoutChangeEvent.CHANGE, recordDate);
    event.target.parent.parent.addEventListener(CalendarLayoutChangeEvent.CHANGE, recordDate);
  }
}

Conclusion

So finally capture/replay in SeleniumFlex becomes a reality! Nonetheless there is some work to do to support the different kinds of flex controls and Selenium commands.

Stacked smartness doesn’t add up

When a software is composed of different layers, friction occurs. That’s when features turn into bugs.

houseofcardsThere is a strong urge to make software smart. Whenever something smart gets built in, it’s called a feature. Features of a software are effects you don’t foresee, but find handy for your use case. If your use case is impaired by a feature, you’ll likely call it a bug.

Some features of various software

To make my point clear, i have to introduce two features of software that are very practical for their anticipated use case and then change their context by adding another layer:

Ant filesets

If you use Ant as a build script language, you’ll find filesets very pratical. If you want to modify, copy or delete a bunch of files, you specify a root directory and some similarities between the files (like equal filetypes or names) and you’re done. Let me give you an example to show the use case:

<delete>
    <fileset dir="${basedir}" include="**/build.xml,**/pom.xml"/>
</delete>

This will very likely delete all ant build scripts and maven setting files in your project (so please use with care). Notice how the include attribute is comma-separated for multiple patterns. According to the documentation, the comma can be omitted for a space character.

Then, there is Hudson, a very powerful continuous integration server. One source of its power is the familiarity of configuration syntax, specifically when accessing a bunch of files:

hudson-include

The given text field specifies the include attribute of an Ant fileset. You immediately inherit all the power of ant’s fileset, but the features, too. Here, it’s a feature that two pattern can be excluded by just a space character. If your path contains spaces, you cannot express your pattern in this text field. When using the fileset directly in Ant, you can alter the syntax and use multiple nested include tags, but within Hudson, you are stuck with the single include attribute.

Struts2 internationalization

The second example is fully described in my previous blog entry (“The perils of \u0027”).

As a short summary: The Struts2 framework inherits the power of Java’s MessageFormat when loading language dependent text. As the apostrophe is a special character to MessageFormat, it cannot be used directly in the text entries.

The principle behind the examples

Both examples share a common principle: “Stacked smartness doesn’t add up“. What’s a feature to one software, may be a bug to a software that builds on top of it.

Software developers tend to “stack up” different third party software products to compose their own product with even higher-level functionality. There is nothing wrong with this approach, as long as the context of the underlying products doesn’t change much. If it changes, features begin to behave like bugs.

The cost of stacking

Stacked products are likely to increase the ability of skilled users to re-use their knowledge. Every developer familiar to Ant will instantly be empowered to use the file patterns of Hudson. Every developer familiar to MessageFormat can produce powerful i18n entries that do most of the formatting automatically. That’s a great productivity gain.

But on the other side, if you aren’t familiar to ant when using hudson or know nothing about MessageFormat when just translating the i18n entries of a Struts2 webapp, you’ll be surprised by strange effects. And you won’t find sufficient documentation of these effects in the first place. There will be a link to some obscure project or class you never heard about, telling you all sorts of details you don’t want to hear right now. You can’t easily put them into the right context anyway. You will be down to trial and error, frustrated that your use case seems impossible without explanation. That’s a great productivity loss.

Often, you can’t blame any part of the stack, not even the topmost, for the occuring bugs. If a specific stack maintains and increases productivity, depends on the use case of the topmost layer compared to the underlying anticipated ones. If those aren’t documentated, its hard to notice the displacement.

A metaphor on software stacks

Whenever I hear about a software stack, a picture of a man on a stack of crates occurs to me. Here is the original photo of my thoughts.

What’s your encounter with a shaky stacking?

The perils of \u0027

Adventures (read: pitfalls) of internationalization with Struts2, concerning the principle “stacked smartness doesn’t add up”.

u0027Struts2 is a framework for web application development in Java. It’s considered mature and feature-rich and inherits the internationalization (i18n) capabilities of the Java platform. This is what you would expect. In fact, the i18n features of Struts2 are more powerful than the platform ones, but the power comes with a price.

Examples of the sunshine path

If you read a book like “Struts 2 in Action” written by Donald Brown and others, you’ll come across a chapter named “Understanding internationalization” (it’s chapter 11). You’ll get a great overview with a real-world example of what is possible (placeholder expansion, for example) and if you read a bit further, there is a word of warning:

“You might also want to further investigate the MessageFormat class of the Java platform. We saw its fundamentals in this chapter when we learned of the native Java support for parameterization of message texts and the autoformatting of date and numbers. As we indicated earlier, the MessageFormat class is much richer than we’ve had the time to demonstrate. We recommend consulting the Java documentation if you have further formatting needs as well. “

If you postpone this warning, you’re doomed. It’s not the fault of the book that their examples are the sunshine case (the best circumstances that might happen). The book tries to teach you the basics of Struts2, not its pitfalls.

A pitfall of Struts2 I18N

You will write a web application in Struts2, using the powerful built-in i18n, just to discover that some entries aren’t printed right. Let’s have an example i18n entry:

impossible.action.message=You can't do this

If you include this entry in a webpage using Struts2 i18n tags, you’ll find the apostrophe (unicode character \u0027) missing:

You cant do this

What happened? You didn’t read all about MessageFormat. The apostrophe is a special character for the MessageFormat parser, indicating regions of non-interpreted text (Quoted Strings). As there is only one apostrophe in our example, it just gets omitted and ignored. If there were two of them, both would be omitted and all expansion effort between them would be ceased.

How to overcome the pitfall

You’ll need to escape the apostrophe to have it show up. Here’s the paragraph of the MessageFormat APIDoc:

Within a String, "''" represents a single quote. A QuotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes; the surrounding single quotes are removed. An UnquotedString can contain arbitrary characters except single quotes and left curly brackets. Thus, a string that should result in the formatted message “‘{0}'” can be written as "'''{'0}''" or "'''{0}'''".

That’s bad news. You have to tell your translators to double-type their apostrophes, else they won’t show up. But only the ones represented by \u0027, not the specialized ones of the higher unicode regions like “grave accent”  or “acute accent”. If you already have a large amount of translations, you need to check every apostrophe if it was meant to be printed or to control the MessageFormat parser.

The underlying principle

This unexpected behaviour of an otherwise powerful functionality is a common sign of a principle I call “stacked smartness doesn’t add up”. I will blog about the principle in the near future, so here’s just a short description: A powerful (smart) behaviour makes sense in the original use case, but when (re-)used in another layer of functionality, it becomes a burden, because strange side-effects need to be taken care of.

How to find the HTML Entity you look for

As a webdeveloper have you ever wondered how a special character has to be encoded as a html entity? There is a nice little tool available online that will answer your call for help.EntityLook for 'b' What makes the tool really rock is the simplicity and great incremental search. Typing in the letter ‘c’ will present you entities for “cent”, “copyright”, the greek “sigma” and mathematical entities like “superset” because the basic shape of the resulting special character is also considered. Upon entering a ‘b’ you will get the german ß as one of the results.This kind of search is almost a “do what I mean” feature and very helpful if you do not know exact substrings or meaning of your special character.

There is a Firefox-Extension and as a special goodie for our beloved Mac-users there is even a dashboard widget available that works without internet connection and is a bit more convenient to use than the web application.

Easy code inspection using QDox

Spend five minutes and inspect your code for the aspect you always wanted to know using the QDox project.

Copyright by http://www.clipartof.com/So, you’ve inspected your Java code in any possible way, using Findbugs, Checkstyle, PMD, Crap4J and many other tools. You know every number by heart and keep a sharp eye on its trend. But what about some simple questions you might ask yourself about your project, like:

  • How many instance variables aren’t final?
  • Are there any setXYZ()-methods without any parameter?
  • Which classes have more than one constructor?

Each of this question isn’t of much relevance to the project, but its answer might be crucial in one specific situation.

Using QDox for throw-away tooling

QDox is a fine little project making steady progress in being a very intuitive Java code structure inspection API. It’s got a footprint of just one JAR (less than 200k) you need to add to your project and one class you need to remember as a starting point. Everything else can be learnt on the fly, using the code completion feature of your favorite IDE.

Let’s answer the first question of our list by printing out all the names of all instance variables that aren’t final. I’m assuming you call this class in your project’s root directory.

public class NonFinalFinder {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
         File sourceFolder = new File(".");
         JavaDocBuilder parser = new JavaDocBuilder();
         builder.addSourceTree(sourceFolder);
         JavaClass[] javaClasses = parser.getClasses();
         for (JavaClass javaClass : javaClasses) {
             JavaField[] fields = javaClass.getFields();
             for (JavaField javaField : fields) {
                 if (!javaField.isFinal()) {
                     System.out.println("Field "
                       + javaField.getName()
                       + " of class "
                       + javaClass.getFullyQualifiedName()
                       + " is not final.");
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

The QDox parser is called JavaDocBuilder for historical reasons. It takes a directory through addSourceTree() and parses all the java files it finds in there recursively. That’s all you need to program to gain access to your code structure.

In our example, we descend into the code hierarchy using the parser.getClasses() method. From the JavaClass objects, we retrieve their JavaFields and ask each one if it’s final, printing out its name otherwise.

Praising QDox

The code needed to answer our example question is seven lines in essence. Once you navigate through your code structure, the QDox API is self-explanatory. You only need to remember the first two lines of code to get started.

The QDox project had a long quiet period in the past while making the jump to the Java 5 language spec. Today, it’s a very active project published under the Apache 2.0 license. The developers add features nearly every day, making it a perfect choice for your next five-minute throw-away tool.

What’s your tool idea?

Tell me about your code specific aspect you always wanted to know. What would an implementation using QDox look like?

Structuring CppUnit Tests

How to structure cppunit tests in non-trivial software systems so that they can be easily executed selectively during code-compile-test cycle and at the same time are easy to execute as a whole by your continuous integration system.

While unit testing in Java is dominated by JUnit, C++ developers can choose between a variety of frameworks. See here for a comprehensive list. Here you can find a nice comparison of the biggest players in the game.

Being probably one of the oldest frameworks CppUnit sure has some usability issues but is still widely used. It is criticised mostly because you have to do a lot of boilerplate typing to add new tests. In the following I will not repeat how tests can be written in CppUnit as this is described already exhaustively (e.g. here or here). Instead I will concentrate on the task of how to structure CppUnit tests in bigger projects. “Bigger” in this case means at least a few architectually independent parts which are compiled independently, i.e. into different libraries.

Having independently compiled parts in your project means that you want to compile their unit tests independently, too. The goal is then to structure the tests so that they can easily be executed selectively during development time by the programmer and at the same time are easy to execute as a whole during CI time (CI meaning Continuous Integration, of course).

As C++ has no reflection or other meta programming elements like the Java Annotations, things like automatic test discovery and how to add new tests become a whole topic of its own. See the CppUnit cookbook for how to do that with CppUnit . In my projects I only use the TestFactoryRegistry approach because it provides the most automatics in this regard.

Let’s begin with a simplest setup, the Link-Time Trap (see example source code): Test runner and result reporter are setup in the “main” function that is compiled into an executable. The actual unit tests are compiled in separate libraries and are all linked to the executable that contains the main function. While this solution works well for small projects it does not scale. This is simply because every time you change something during the code-compile-test cycle the unit test executable has to be relinked, which can take a considerable amount of time the bigger the project gets. You fall into the Link Time Trap!

The solution I use in many projects is as follows: Like in the simple approach, there is one test main function which is compiled into a test executable. All unit tests are compiled into libraries according to their place in the system architecture. To avoid the Link-Time-Trap, they are not linked to the test executable but instead are automatically discovered and loaded during test execution.

1. Automatic Discovery

Applying a little convention-over-configuration all testing libraries end with the suffix “_tests.so”. The testing main function can then simply walk over the directory tree of the project and find all shared libraries that contain unit test classes.

2. Loading

If a “.._test.so” library has been found, it simply gets loaded using dlopen (under Unix/Linux). When the library is loaded the unit tests are automatically registered with the TestFactoryRegistry.

3. Execution

After all unit test libraries has been found and loaded text execution is the same as in the simple approach above.

Here my enhanced testmain.cpp (see example source code).

#include ... 

using namespace boost::filesystem; 
using namespace std; 

void loadPlugins(const std::string& rootPath) 
{
  directory_iterator end_itr; 
  for (directory_iterator itr(rootPath); itr != end_itr; ++itr) { 
    if (is_directory(*itr)) {
      string leaf = (*itr).leaf(); 
      if (leaf[0] != '.') { 
        loadPlugins((*itr).string()); 
      } 
      continue; 
    } 
    const string fileName = (*itr).string();
    if (fileName.find("_tests.so") == string::npos) { 
      continue;
    }
    void * handle = 
      dlopen (fileName.c_str(), RTLD_NOW | RTLD_GLOBAL); 
    cout << "Opening : " << fileName.c_str() << endl; 
    if (!handle) { 
      cout << "Error: " << dlerror() << endl; 
      exit (1); 
    } 
  } 
} 

int main ( int argc, char ** argv ) { 
  string rootPath = "./"; 
  if (argc > 1) { 
    rootPath = static_cast<const char*>(argv[1]); 
  } 
  cout << "Loading all test libs under " << rootPath << endl; 
  string runArg = std::string ( "All Tests" ); 
  // get registry 
  CppUnit::TestFactoryRegistry& registry = 
    CppUnit::TestFactoryRegistry::getRegistry();
  
  loadPlugins(rootPath); 
  // Create the event manager and test controller 
  CppUnit::TestResult controller; 

  // Add a listener that collects test result 
  CppUnit::TestResultCollector result; 
  controller.addListener ( &result ); 
  CppUnit::TextUi::TestRunner *runner = 
    new CppUnit::TextUi::TestRunner; 

  std::ofstream xmlout ( "testresultout.xml" ); 
  CppUnit::XmlOutputter xmlOutputter ( &result, xmlout ); 
  CppUnit::TextOutputter consoleOutputter ( &result, std::cout ); 

  runner->addTest ( registry.makeTest() ); 
  runner->run ( controller, runArg.c_str() ); 

  xmlOutputter.write(); 
  consoleOutputter.write(); 

  return result.wasSuccessful() ? 0 : 1; 
}

As you can see the loadPlugins function uses the Boost.Filesystem library to walk over the directory tree.

It also takes a rootPath argument which you can give as parameter when you call the test main executable. This solves our goal stated above. When you want to execute unit tests selectively during development you can give the path of the corresponding testing library as parameter. Like so:

./testmain path/to/specific/testing/library

In your CI environment on the other hand you can execute all tests at once by giving the root path of the project, or the path where all testing libraries have been installed to.

./testmain project/root

CMake Builder Plugin for Hudson

Update: Check out my post introducing the newest version of the plugin.

Today I’m pleased to announce the first version of the cmakebuilder plugin for Hudson. It can be used to build cmake based projects without having to write a shell script (see my previous blog post). Using the scratch-my-own-itch approach I started out implementing only those features that I needed for my cmake projects which are mostly Linux/g++ based so far.

Let’s do a quick walk through the configuration:

1. CMake Path:
If the cmake executable is not in your $PATH variable you can set its path in the global Hudson configuration page.

2. Build Configuration:

To use the cmake builder in your Free-style project, just add “CMake Build” to your build steps. The configuration is pretty straight forward. You just have to set some basic directories and the build type.

cmakebuilder demo config
cmakebuilder demo config

The demo config above results in the following behavior (shell pseudocode):

if $WORKSPACE/build_dir does not exist
   mkdir $WORKSPACE/build_dir
end if

cd $WORKSPACE/build_dir
cmake $WORKSPACE/src -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$WORKSPACE/install_dir
make
make install

That’s it. Feedback is very much appreciated!!

Originally the plan was to have the plugin downloadable from the hudson plugins site by now but I still have some publishing problems to overcome. So if you are interested, make sure to check out the plugins site again in a few days. I will also post an update here as soon as the plugin can be downloaded.

Update: After fixing some maven settings I was finally able to publish the plugin. Check it out!

Paging with different DBs

Sometimes you cannot or do not want to use an object-relational mapping tool. When not using an OR-mapper like Hibernate or Oracle Toplink you have to deal with database specifics. One common case especially for web applications is limiting the result set to a number of items that fit nicely on a web. You then often want to allow the users to navigate between these “pages” of items aka “paging”.

This type of functionality became part of SQL only as of SQL2008 in the following form:
SELECT * FROM t WHERE ... ORDER BY c OFFSET start_row FETCH count ONLY

Since most popular database management systems (DBMSes) do not yet implement this syntax you have to implement paging in propriatory ways.

My experience with an Oracle DBMS and the frustrating and comparatively long time it took to find the correct™ solution inspired me to write this post. Now I want to present you the syntax for some widely used DBMSes which we encounter frequently in our projects.

  • MySQL, H2 and PostgreSQL (< 8.4 which will also implement the SQL2008 standard) use the same syntax:
    SELECT * FROM t WHERE ... ORDER BY c LIMIT count OFFSET start
  • Oracle is where the fun begins. There is actually no easy and correct way of doing this. So you will end up with a mess like:
    SELECT col1 FROM (SELECT col1, ROWNUM r FROM (SELECT col1 FROM table ORDER BY col1)) WHERE r BETWEEN start AND end
  • DB2 AFAIK uses the syntax proposed in SQL2008 but correct me if I am wrong because we do not yet work with DB2 databases.
  • As we did not need paging with MS SQLServer as of now I did not bother to look for a solution yet. Hints are very welcome.

With all solutions the ORDER BY clause is critical because SQL does not guarantee the order of the returned rows.

Wikipedia delivers some additional and special case information but does not really explain the general, real world case the specific DBMSes.

I hope that I raised some awareness about database specifics and perhaps saved you some time trying to find a solution the problem using your favorite DBMS.

Software Craftsman Project Priority Survey

Answers to a question of project priorities from the upcoming book “Apprenticeship Patterns”.

apprenticeship-patters-coverThere is an upcoming and very promising book title written by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye called “Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance For The Aspiring Software Craftsman”.  It will cover all the basic rules you’ll need to become a Software Craftsman. This is a rather new term to describe professional software developers, eventually leading to the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto. The Manifesto itself reads like an addition to the Agile Manifesto:

As aspiring Software Craftsmen we are raising the bar of professional software development by practicing it and helping others learn the craft. Through this work we have come to value:

  • Not only working software, but also well-crafted software
  • Not only responding to change, but also steadily adding value
  • Not only individuals and interactions, but also a community of professionals
  • Not only customer collaboration,but also productive partnerships

That is, in pursuit of the items on the left we have found the items on the right to be indispensable.

© 2009, the undersigned. this statement may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety through this notice.

A very good question

When i read the blog of “Apprenticeship Patterns“, i noticed a very good question about project priorities:

Rank the following 3 project attributes in order of importance and explain why.

  • Test Coverage
  • Timely Delivery
  • Code Quality

This question really got me hooked, because there is no single valid answer, only personal statements about values.

An informal survey

I’m in the lucky position of meeting a lot of senior developers and a great number of software engineering students. So I instantly decided to perform a survey on this question and watch out for emerging answer patterns.

I gave each project attribute an unique letter, C for “Test Coverage”, D for “Timely Delivery” and Q for “Code Quality”. There are six possible answers, here are their rates in the survey (when 58 persons gave their answers):stats-all1

  • CDQ: 7 percent
  • CQD: 9 percent
  • DCQ: 5 percent
  • DQC: 7 percent
  • QCD: 41 percent
  • QDC: 31 percent

The vast majority of developers stated Code Quality as their highest goal. This isn’t very surprising to me, as most developers take pride in writing high quality code.

Comparing the answers

But what about the answers of only senior developers? Lets have a look at the numbers without student answers:stats-senior1

  • CDQ: 7 percent
  • CQD: 14 percent
  • DCQ: 7 percent
  • DQC: 14 percent
  • QCD: 21 percent
  • QDC: 36 percent

The big pattern still applies: Code Quality first. It’s amazing to see the other attributes gaining importance, though. To me, that’s a sign that code-centric thinking is one pattern of apprenticeship.

What’s not in the numbers

When i held the survey, the relevant group of people was gathered together, so a discussion of the results arose every time.  But the discussions followed different patterns:

  • The teams (of senior developers) gave very distinct answers while working on the same project. The answers were driven by personal conviction rather than project necessities.
  • The courses (of students) gave more similar answers while having a wide variety of backgrounds. The answers were mostly explained with current project necessities (like security-critical systems as reason for Test Coverage being most important).

When I have to compare the two groups, I tend to say that younger developers are more driven by extrinsic demands while more experienced developers act on their own internal values.

Our duty as Software Craftsman

In conclusion, I see a duty for experienced developers: to share their experience. Leading a discussion about “Team Values” at your current project is the least you can do. Helping others to develop their own set of internal values, even if it isn’t yours, seems crucial to me.

The upcoming “Apprenticeship Patterns” book and the brand new “97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know” are perfect starting points for this.

Make friends with your compiler

Suppose you are a C++ programmer on a project and you have the best intentions to write really good code. The one fellow that you better make friends with is your compiler. He will support you in your efforts whenever he can. Unless you don’t let him. One sure way to reject his help is to switch off all compiler warnings. I know it should be well-known by now that compiling at high warning levels is something to do always and anytime but it seems that many people just don’t do it.
Taking g++ as example, high warning levels do not mean just having “-Wall” switched on. Even if its name suggests otherwise, “-Wall” is just the minimum there. If you just spend like 5 minutes or so to look at the man page of g++ you find many many more helpful and reasonable -W… switches. For example (g++-4.3.2):


-Wctor-dtor-privacy: Warn when a class seems unusable because all the constructors or destructors in that class are private, and it has neither friends nor public static member functions.

Cool stuff! Let’s what else is there:


-Woverloaded-virtual: Warn when a function declaration hides virtual functions from a base class. Example:

class Base
{
public:
virtual void myFunction();
};

class Subclass : public Base
{
public:
void myFunction() const;
};

I would certainly like to be warned about that, but may be that’s just me.


-Weffc++: Warn about violations of the following style guidelines from Scott Meyers’ Effective C++ book

This is certainly one of the most “effective” weapons in your fight for bug-free software. It causes the compiler to spit out warnings about code issues that can lead to subtle and hard-to-find bugs but also about things that are considered good programming practice.

So suppose you read the g++ man page, you enabled all warning switches additional to “-Wall” that seem reasonable to you and you plan to compile your project cleanly without warnings. Unfortunately, chances are quite high that your effort will be instantly thwarted by third-party libraries that your code includes. Because even if your code is clean and shiny, header files of third-pary library may be not. Especially with “-Weffc++” this could result in a massive amount of warning messages in code that you have no control of. Even with the otherwise powerful, easy-to-use and supposedly mature Qt library you run into that problem. Compiling code that includes Qt headers like <QComboBox>with “-Weffc++” switched on is just unbearable.

Leaving aside the fact that my confidence in Qt has declined considerably since I noticed this, the question remains what to do ignore the shortcomings of other peoples code. With GCC you can for example add pragmas around offending includes as desribed here. Or you can create wrapper headers for third-party includes that contain


#pragma GCC system_header

AFAIK Microsoft’s compilers have similar pragmas:


#pragma warning(push, 1)
#include
#include
#pragma warning(pop)

Warning switches are a powerful tool to increase your code quality. You just have to use them!