To automate C++ code quality analysis in our company, I've been asked to integrate Cppcheck tool with our SonarQube server (through the C++ Community plugin).
For the C++ part of our main product, in Visual Studio, we have a dozen of solutions, with almost a hundred of projects within each solution.
We use standard inherited property page macros like $(SolutionDir) and $(ProjectDir), and define our own custom (user-defined) macros as well (via Property Manager).
I'm currently writing Windows command line batch scripts to perform static code analysis separately on each solution. The idea is to run Cppcheck with an option like --project="solution_name.sln" and then run SonarQube Scanner to parse the generated XML output.
But there's a problem. It seems that Cppcheck doesn't recognize these $(SolutionDir) macros during include path resolution. (When run with --check-config option, it complains about missing include files.)
Unfortunately it turns out I even cannot supply additional include paths for a solution because the -I and --includes-file options are ignored when --project is specified.
How is Cppcheck supposed to be used with Visual Studio projects in an automated environment? I'm talking about command line interface (to be used on server side), not about interactive plugins (as used locally on developers' machines).
One possible way would be to create a Python script to preprocess the hundreds of project (*.vcxproj) files, replacing all these macros with real paths (each time after checking out from SVN and before executing Cppcheck). Or is there a proper way to make Cppcheck recognize Visual Studio macros?
Yes the --project is supposed to work. It's just that --project is a very new feature.
I would like to have a simple solution so I can reproduce easily.. Could you create some simple solution with such configuration? no real code is needed. I think a cpp file with just a #include and then an empty header might be enough. Configure it so that Visual Studio finds the header but Cppcheck doesn't.
Please attach it to the ticket orbitcowboy created.