cookies and code

If you’re using FlexCover as a code coverage tool within your Flex build process, the resulting report will be an XML file with a .cvr file extension. Currently there are no FlexCover plugins for the popular CI servers (i.e. – Hudson, Cruise Control, Bamboo, etc), so to take advantage of the cool baked-in reporting for code coverage, an XML report for a supported report format (e.g. – Emma, Cobertura, Clover) is needed. Currently Paul over at eyefodder has a solution using a custom build of the CoverageViewer and CoverageAgent which will produce an Emma formatted report.

Instead of creating my own custom build of FlexCover, I decided to work on an XSL transformation to the Cobertura XML report format to see if I could have any success. After a pain-staking journey back into the world of XSL, I was able to throw together an XSLT that is working with Hudson’s Cobertura plugin. You can find the XSLT under FlexUnit4 source control @ http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flexunit/branches/4.x/FlexUnit4Test/fc-to-cobertura.xsl. If you’d like to see the reports generated for Hudson in action, check out http://flexunit.digitalprimates.net/view/Flex%203.2/job/FlexUnit4-Flex3.2/cobertura/. We currently only have the builds using Flex SDK 3.2 running with FlexCover since the latest version of FlexCover (0.81) only supports versions 3.0 and 3.2 of the SDK. Looks like some work has been done to integrate with Flex 4.0, so as support is added to FlexCover, I’ll add that work into the FlexUnit4 CI builds.

To use this XSLT to transform the CVR file, make sure you are using an XSLT 2.0 compatible engine (e.g. – Saxon) with your build tool of choice. Additionally, you will need to provide three paramaters to the stylesheet for it to work correctly:

• sourcePath – A comma delimited list of absolute paths to the source directories, each excluding a trailing slash, for which the instrumented SWC/SWF was created.
• version – The version number of FlexCover you used to generate the CVR file.
• timestamp – The date/time in which the transformation occurred in ms from epoch. I’m using a date format of “MM/DD/yyyy HH:mm:ss.SSS’ and I’m not having any issues, but it may be ignored by the Hudson plugin.

If anyone has any suggestions on rewriting the XSLT using XSL 1.0 instead of 2.0, please let me know, I’m definitely open to refactoring it. Thus far the results look fairly consistent with a Cobertura XML report and integration with Hudson’s Cobertura plugin is working out great. Hope this helps those who are trying to tackle the FlexCover CI integration problem.