Jacoco XML format cannot work as good as the binary format for multi-module maven

[Colin]

Peter,

Thanks for the feedback. Heads-up: support for the JaCoCo binary format is already dropped as of v6.0 of SonarQube’s Java Analyzer.

It was dropped for good reasons (see MMF-1651)

We have two ways to load coverage data generated by JaCoCo for Java projects: thru the .exec or thru the XML file.

We know that the .exec file is not an exchange format. This is an internal format used by JaCoCo developers. It is not at all recommended to use it for integration purpose.

Because of that, we want to get rid of the support of the .exec file format and rely only on the XML one.

It’s a pain for both our Java analyzer developers and for SonarQube users when the binary format gets updated and SonarQube hasn’t had time to catch up. It’s happened before where a range of JaCoCo versions had to be marked as compatible for coverage import, which is just… messy, and inconvenient. The .exec format, while perhaps convenient, is not a stable integration point.

I think your use-case is covered in this post under Multi module builds

[Coverage & Test Data] Importing JaCoCo coverage report in XML format

Importing JaCoCo coverage report in XML format Version 5.12 of our SonarJava analyzer deprecated uses JaCoCo’s binary format (.exec files) to import coverage. This binary format is internal to the JaCoCo project, and as such there are no guarantees for backward compatibility, so it should not be used for integration purposes. As a replacement, when you scan a project with Sonar scanner, we use a special Jacoco report analyzer, which imports your JaCoCo’s XML coverage report, and this is the pr…

If you have any feedback or ideas on how the configuration could be made easier, we’re happy to hear it!