Add a build tool to check for style guide violations

[Shane O'Sullivan]

The Dojo Style Guide is extremely comprehensive, and covers a wide variety of coding standards. While many of these are very difficult to enforce automatically, there are also many style guideline violations that can be detected using a build tool.

I propose adding a new build tool that generates a style guide violation report. A patch is attached which shows an initial approach that could be taken for this.

To use it, apply the patch and then, in util/buildscripts, type:

build action=checkstyle

This generates a report for all of Dojo, Dijit and Dojox, excluding tests and demos folders.

To check just a single folder, type:

build action=checkstyle checkstyleDir=dojo/base

The folder specified is relative to the root of the Dojo folder structure.

Once the report is generated, open the checkstyleReport.html file.

[Adam Peller]

If we had such a tool, it could be applied as a pre-checkin step also. We've discussed this before, but never gotten far. A simple, but controversial approach would be to just adopt Crockford's jslint rules.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Updated patch

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Updated patch that makes it easier to integrate with other code. checkstyleUtil no longer opens and reads a file itself.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Update patch, files moved to their own util/checkstyle folder

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Updated patch, support for specifying individual files, throwing exception on failure

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Improved help

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17569]) Refs #9278 Adding a build to to check for style guide violations. It provides a command line interface to run the checks on all JavaScript? files in the Dojo tree, a HTML file to view and manipulate the results, and a PHP file that can be used to save the fixed files.

The readme.txt file contains instructions on its use, and the commmand

checkstyle.sh help

prints more help text.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17579]) Refs #9278 Added checks for characters being inside strings, and omits them from style checks. Also rearranged the UI to show the file list and edit panel in the same tab.

[Nathan Toone]

(In [17580]) Refs #9278 - change line endings so it will run on MacOS

[Nathan Toone]

(In [17581]) Refs #9278 - update shell script to point to the correct js file

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17582]) Refs #9278 Added code to fix spaces after if, else, while and switch statements when the Make Fixes button is clicked in the UI.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17585]) Refs #9278 Added code to replace two consecutive spaces with a tab

[Eugene Lazutkin]

Huh. I thought we used the "4 spaces per tab" convention. And replacement should be done when certain conditions are met, e.g., proper tab locations, not arbitrary N spaces.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Eugene,

More accurace fixes are of course welcome. However, I've used these on a few files and they seem to work very well. As I replace four spaces with tabs first, then two spaces, I cover both the case where people have correctly set their editor to use four spaces for tabs, and where they have incorrectly set up their editors to use two spaces per tab.

If you'd like to make some modifications, please feel free to do so.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17586]) Refs #9278 Fixed bug in PHP file that was preventing files being saved.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [17615]) Refs #9278 Added exceptions for regular expressions. Given that almost any characters can appear in a regular expression, they should not be checked for style violations. This change essentially treats regular expressions as comments.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [20437]) Refs #9278 Fixes issues with saving the file when a directory is not specified

[Shane O'Sullivan]

(In [20451]) Refs #9278 Fixes issues with loading a file for editing in the Checkstyle viewer when the user has filtered by directory.

[Shane O'Sullivan]

Checkstyle tool is now quite stable and usable. Any future issues can be logged as separate tickets, so closing this one.

[bill]

(In [20604]) Doc permission problems on mac, refs #9278.