kotlin:S6518 false positive accessing non property get method

Rules and Languages Report False-positive / False-negative...
1

Then tell us:

  • What language is this for? Kotlin ( java interop )
  • Which rule? kotlin:S6518
  • SonarQube Server / Community Build - Developer Edition v2025.6.1 (117629)
  • How can we reproduce the problem? Give us a self-contained snippet of code

Given the following Java class definition

package sandbox;

public class UserId {
    private final String value;

    public UserId(String value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public String get() {
        return value;
    }
}

and the following kotlin code

package sandbox

data class User(val id: UserId, val name: String)

interface UserRepository {
    fun findById(id: String): User?
    fun save(user: User): User?
}

class UserService(val repository: UserRepository) {
    fun updateUserName(userId: UserId, newName: String) {
        // The call to .get() below wrongly triggers kotlin:S6518
        repository.findById(userId.get())?.let {  // <====== HERE
            repository.save(it.copy(name = newName))
        } ?: throw IllegalStateException(
            "User with id $userId not found",
        )
    }
}

the rule should not be triggered yet it is triggered both in sonar and in sonar lint in Intellij

5

Hi Jean,

Thanks for the report and the reproducer. I was able to confirm this issue under certain conditions. The good news is that we are already working on a fix for this issue and will release a fix within the near future.

7

thank you !

10

Hello Johann,

Any news on a fix for this issue ? It’s been a while now and forced us to downgrade the rule to info while waiting for a fix.

A quick search in the community forum lists at least 5 different report for incorrect set or get calls being flagged ( I encounted both ) and that’s only for people who bothered reporting the rule.

11

Hi Jean,

The issue has been fixed and was released to SonarQube Cloud in May, along with SonarQube Server 2026.3 (and SonarQube Community Build 26.6).

Are you still experiencing the issue on a recent SonarQube Server version?

12

Hello johann,

thanks for your answer, you are correct that the reproducer I provided in this thread has been fixed.

It seems the fix was not mentioned in the release notes (Release notes | SonarQube Server | Sonar Documentation)

I kind of expected a fix to address all issues that had been reported and was disapointed to see we still had alerts on jooq code as described in kotlin:S6518 False Positive using JOOQ

but I confirm the get side seems to be ok now

15

Hello @Jean_Helou!

Indeed, we did some improvements to the rule back in May, and I can’t reproduce the problem on the exact code snippet from the thread you linked. The rule S6518 currently flags set(...) calls only if there is no subsequent dot-qualified call, i.e. the result of the set function is unused. And in this case, the rule will only flag the last call in the chain.

Could you provide a specific reproducer for jooq that you encounter in your code (and, for that matter, any unresolved reproducers for this rule that you still have)?

Best,

Peter

16

Hi peter,

I was still encountering s6518 false positives on jooq code in yesterday’s anlysis on 2026.3 I upgraded our sonar install to 2026.4 yesterday and now that the nightly run has passed we don’t have any violations anymore so I guess the may improvements have been release in 2026.4

When I search for s6518 in the sonar release notes for 2026.3 or 2026.4 I don’t have any hit this makes it difficult to know when fixes have landed

is there a better place than Release notes | SonarQube Server | Sonar Documentation to look for specific rule changes ?