How to get coverage reports when there is no coverage

[Deleted user]

I have a product written in Java where I have many (over 250) separately-instrumented modules. Unfortunately, many of these modules have no coverage generated during our tests. However, I still need a coverage report generated for them, so that I have an accurate count of the total number of lines that are not covered in our product. Otherwise, I want exactly the same report that the clover-html-report ant task generates. It must be exactly the same because (a) people have gotten used to the report format, and (b) I run an XSLT to parse the summary HTML files to extract the actual coverage numbers I need for the product-wide summary that I generate.

I see that the clover-report task has an "alwaysReport" option, but it seems I can't use that without having to define the entire report format (including the columns, etc.), plus there doesn't seem to be a way to specify the outdir parameter.

Is there a way to convince clover-html-report to write out reports even when there is no coverage?

[Deleted user · Accepted solution]

OK, here is exactly what I needed in order to produce exactly the same reports, with the only change being that the reports are always generated:

<clover-report initstring="${build.coverage.clover.dbdir}/${build.number}/@{module}/clover.db" coverageCacheSize="128m" >
	<current alwaysReport="true" outfile="${html.dir.local}/${build.number}/@{module}" title="Coverage for module @{module}">
		<format type="html"/>
	</current>
</clover-report>

The only problem now is that the reports for modules with no coverage end up with a date of 1/1/1970. Completely understandable - with no coverage, where would it remember a date? However, it would be better if it at least tried to use the same date as when the report was run.

[Marek Parfianowicz]

The <clover-html-report> does not have the alwaysReport option. It means that you'd have to use a <clover-report> instead.

The <clover-report> task has an option to set the output directory - use the <current outfile="..."> or the <historical outfile="...">.

[Deleted user]

So, if I change this:

<clover-html-report initstring="${build.coverage.clover.dbdir}/${build.number}/@{module}/clover.db" outdir="${html.dir.local}/${build.number}" title="Coverage for module @{module}" coverageCacheSize="128m" />

to this:

<clover-report initstring="${build.coverage.clover.dbdir}/${build.number}/@{module}/clover.db" coverageCacheSize="128m" >
  <current alwaysReport="true" outfile="${html.dir.local}/${build.number}" title="Coverage for module @{module}" />
</clover-report>

then I should get the same reports that I corrently do, with the addition of the empty reports?

One of the confusing things in the documentation: the "current" nested element says that the default format is XML, but the "format" nested element says that it is is omitted, an HTML report is generated. Which is it?

[Marek Parfianowicz]

Indeed, documentation was confusing, I just fixed it.

When the <current> has the summary="true" then the default format is PDF, otherwise it's XML.

You can change a report type by defining the <format type="html|pdf|xml|json"> tag inside the <current> (or the <historical>).