SonarQube is not using sonar.cpd settings when performing a scan on a dotnet project

[mb_centaurea (Mikhail)]

Hello,
At my workplace we are experiencing problems with analysis of .NET projects, in which code duplication detection seems to be unaffected by the sonar.cpd.cs.minimumtokens and sonar.cpd.cs.minimumLines setting. These setting are correctly appearing for each scan in “Project Settings → Show Background Tasks → Scanner Context”, but it does not seem to affect the analysis: if I set high values (1000 tokens and 100 lines), it keeps detecting the duplicated blocks, and the other way around: with small values of 5 tokens and 2 lines, two identical functions and only 4 lines are not detected.

How can I troubleshoot this problem? Are there other settings affecting duplicate code detection?

Must-share information (formatted with Markdown):

• SonarQube Server Developer Edition 10.6 (although this is also reproducible on SonarQube Server Community Edition 10.7), dotnet-sonarscanner 9.0.0
• Helm
• Decrease the number of tokens/lines for duplication detection
• Changing scanner configuration values in the .csproj file and also passing them directly as argument to the scanner

[mb_centaurea (Mikhail)]

I’ve prepared sample repository here. There are main and feature branch, both have sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens and sonar.cpd.cs.minimumLines settings set to a high number (1000) yet when analysis performed (either on Community edition or Developer edition with Pull Request Analysis) it reports the duplicate code as if the settings are ignored.

[alexander.meseldzija (Alex Meseldzija)]

Hi @mb_centaurea, welcome to the community and thanks for the reproduction!

I believe there may be a typo in the command being used.

sonar.cpd.cs.minimumtokens vs sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens
Please note the camel case.
Setting the value using the .csproj only works for some parameters and this is not one of them.

I’ve tried analysing your solution using the following with v9.0.0 of the scanner and uploading to SonarQube Server and SonarQube Cloud.

 dotnet .\SonarScanner.MSBuild.dll begin /o:"alexmeseldzija" /k:"alexmeseldzija_cpd-test" /d:sonar.host.url="https://sonarcloud.io" /d:sonar.token="<SONAR_TOKEN>" /d:sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens=1000 /d:sonar.cpd.cs.minimumLines=1000

You can see the result with no duplications on sonarcloud here.

If you go to the overview for that project you can also see how the duplications change when I switched the sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens && sonar.cpd.cs.minimumLines to 2 each.

Can you re-run your analysis with sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens and confirm it works?

If not could you please share the logs from the scan?

Add /d:"sonar.verbose=true" to the SonarScanner.MSBuild.exe or dotnet sonarscanner begin command to get more detailed logs

• For example: SonarScanner.MSBuild.exe begin /k:"MyProject" /d:"sonar.verbose=true"

[mb_centaurea (Mikhail)]

@alexander.meseldzija

Setting the value using the .csproj only works for some parameters and this is not one of them.

I tried executing the scan with the parameters provided in the command line and seems like that worked, thanks! Unfortunately I can’t seem to find in the documentation what parameters can’t be specified in the .csproj file. In case if project contains multiple languages, should all parameters be specified in the command line?

@alexander.meseldzija

I beleive there may be a typo in the command being used.

sonar.cpd.cs.minimumtokens vs sonar.cpd.cs.minimumTokens
Please note the camel case.

It seems there is a typo in the documentation where I copied it from (at Analysis parameters & SonarQube), do you happen to know where I can report that to be fixed?

[Colin]

@mb_centaurea

It seems there is a typo in the documentation where I copied it from (at Analysis parameters & SonarQube), do you happen to know where I can report that to be fixed?

We’ve sent it to our Docs team.

[cyn.bethea]

It’s been updated.

Thank you, we appreciate when people take the time to help us correct issues with the Docs.