Option to generate cppcheck reports as xml file

[osechet]

It would be nice to have an option to generate ccpcheck reports as an xml file. When calling cppcheck, using the --xml --output-file=<output_file> arguments forces cppcheck to output its report to the given file.

[scheibel]

My version of cppcheck (1.82 on Ubuntu 18.04) does not document the --output-file parameter. However, the parameter is usable and your suggestion is reasonable.

What I would want to discuss are actual implementation details.

(1) You suggest to add a cmake option. I wonder if such option would toggle the xml-output for all health checks or just for cppcheck. More specifically, would such an option be called OPTION_XML_REPORTS or OPTION_CPPCHECK_XML_REPORTS.

(2) Alternative approaches are the ability to extend the command-line arguments passed to cppcheck at a more visible location in the setup. Example:

set(CPPCHECK_FLAGS "--enable=all --verbose --suppress=missingIncludeSystem
--xml --output-file="\\${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/cppcheck-\\${target}.xml")

(3) What I currently test is the addition of more cmake targets where their names encode the output to xml. An example of the current health check targets:

• check-all
• check-baselib
• check-fiblib
• cppcheck-baselib
• cppcheck-fiblib
• clang-tidy-baselib
• clang-tidy-fiblib

I'm thinking of adding these additional cmake targets:

• check-all-xml
• check-baselib-xml
• check-fiblib-xml
• cppcheck-baselib-xml
• cppcheck-fiblib-xml
• clang-tidy-baselib-xml
• clang-tidy-fiblib-xml

[osechet]

The 3 solutions seem interesting. My personal need is only about cppcheck so a OPTION_CPPCHECK_XML_REPORTS would be good. However I agree it would be better to have a more general mechanism. For that reason, the OPTION_XML_REPORTS could be interesting but what happens if a future health tool cannot generate an XML report?

I don't really like the 2nd suggestion. It forces people to know the arguments. It isn't very flexible neither. When manually building the project, I may want to get normal cppcheck reports and only generate the XML reports when running CI/CD.

I like the 3rd option but I'm afraid it would make the project more and more complex if new health tools are added in the future.