XML/XSLT

Useful SourceMonitor Reports in CruiseControl

Eden Ridgway — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 01:09:28 GMT

The ideas in this post were inspired by the work done by Robin Curry in his post Integrating SourceMonitor Code Metrics Into An NAnt / CruiseControl.NET Build. He did some great work and I would like to express my gratitude.

Unfortunately I found that those CruiseControl stylesheets gave me far too much information. The summary data that SourceMonitor produces also is not as useful as it could be. What I wanted on my build server was a way to quickly glance at the state of the code on a project and to identify code that needed to be reviewed or refactored. At the end of the day the only information I was really interested in was the code complexity and how deeply nested the code blocks were.

The other problem with the SourceMonitor output is that, depending on the size of the project, it could be between 100K and 300K and if you multiply that by the number of projects and checkins on your build server it quickly adds up. At my company it would amount to about 20MB a day. I therefore decided to take Grant Drake’s NCoverExplorer approach and summarise the output before integrating it with CruiseControl. To do this I created a simple stylesheet that is run after creating a detailed SourceMonitor report.

The end result of all that work is a report that looks like this:

To get all this to work you need to do the following:

Copy the file SourceMonitor.xsl (2.88 KB) into your CruiseControl.Net\webdashboard\xsl folder.
Add the following line to the dashboard.config (in CruiseControl.Net\webdashboard).

Copy the file SourceMonitorSummaryGeneration.xsl (2.18 KB) to your build script folder or a common location.
Ensure that you have installed MsBuild Community Tasks available at http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/. You also need to ensure that you have imported the Community Task targets in your build file:

Add the following to your MsBuild script and call the RunSourceMonitor target. Substitute the paths depending on your project directory structure and the location of the xsl file above.

<PropertyGroup>
<SourceMonitorCommand>
<![CDATA[
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
<sourcemonitor_commands>
<write_log>false</write_log>
<command>
<project_file>TempProject.smp</project_file>
<project_language>CSharp</project_language>
<source_directory>..\</source_directory>
<include_subdirectories>true</include_subdirectories>
<export>
<export_file>..\SourceMonitorDetailedOutput.xml</export_file>
<export_type>2</export_type>
</export>
</command>
</sourcemonitor_commands>
]]>
</SourceMonitorCommand>
</PropertyGroup>


<Target Name="RunSourceMonitor">


<WriteLinesToFile
File="SourceMonitorCommands.xml"
Lines="$(SourceMonitorCommand)"
Overwrite="true" />


<Exec
Command="&quote;C:\Program Files\SourceMonitor\SourceMonitor.exe&quote; /C SourceMonitorCommands.xml" />


<Xslt
Inputs="..\SourceMonitorDetailedOutput.xml"
Xsl="SourceMonitorSummaryGeneration.xsl"
Output="..\SourceMonitorResults.xml" />


<Delete Files="..\SourceMonitorDetailedOutput.xml;TempProject.smp;SourceMonitorCommands.xml" />

</Target>

Make sure you are integrating the XML output into your CruiseControl report. I set it up so that all files ending with Results.xml are included.

<publishers>
<merge>
<files>
<file>*Results.xml</file>
</files>
</merge>
</publishers>

And viola you should have your summarised SourceMonitor view of the 15 most complex and deeply nested pieces of code for your current system.

I hope that you find this useful.

AJAX Sites

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 01:24:31 GMT

The following AJAX related sites/posting are quite interesting:

Dan Grossman blogged about the top 10 AJAX applications that he's seen
Backbase sells AJAX .Net controls which could be quite useful
Ajaxian is a blog containing a list of AJAX sites and developments

Playing with a few of the AJAX applications and controls it would appear that quite a few of the authors have not made the XMLHttp calls work asynchronously because the browser locks while processing which kind of defeats the purpose of AJAX in my opinion. If the browser is unresponsive while processing a call to the server you might as well post the whole page back to the server.

Xml Serialization - Useful Information

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 06:47:09 GMT

Lately I've been dealing with a fair amount of XML serialization and since I know that I'll need this information again, I'm going to blog it. Here are useful sites:

XmlSerializerPreCompiler - allows you to find out why that darn object won't serialize :)
The IXmlSerializable interface - can potentially be used to validate the stream before serialization

Adding the following to you config file will generate the serialization class in C:\Documents and Settings\[YourMachineName]\ASPNET\Local Settings\Temp or C:\Documents and Settings\[YourMachineName]\[Current User]\Local Settings\Temp (information from Daniel Cazzulino)

<system.diagnostics>
<switches>
<add name="XmlSerialization.Compilation" value="4"/>
</switches>
</system.diagnostics>

Autogenerating a Normal Class and not a Strongly Typed Dataset from an XSD

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 15:18:04 GMT

The xsd.exe .Net SDK utility is seemingly not well known. I knew that it could be used to generate an XSD from an XML example, but I had never used it to generate a serializable C# class. This turns out to be exactly what is needed on a project I'm currently working on.

To get the xsd utility (possibly found at C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\SDK\v1.1\Bin) to generate a class, uses the following command:

xsd.exe /c SourceSchema.xsd

The code it will generate will look something like this:

//------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// <autogenerated>
// This code was generated by a tool.
// Runtime Version: 1.1.4322.2032
//
// Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if
// the code is regenerated.
// </autogenerated>
//------------------------------------------------------------------------------

//
// This source code was auto-generated by xsd, Version=1.1.4322.2032.
//
using System.Xml.Serialization;

/// <remarks/>
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlRootAttribute(Namespace="", IsNullable=false)]
public class CreateApplication {

/// <remarks/>
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute("CreatedApplications")]
public CreateApplicationOutput[] CreatedApplications;
}

/// <remarks/>
public class CreateApplicationOutput {

/// <remarks/>
public string Account;

/// <remarks/>
public object ApplicationID;
}

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