Working with PMD rules

Question

How to work with PMD rules. Where to place that xml file and run against my application?

Answer 1

If you are using Eclipse look at oneofthelions answer.

Here an Ant task to generate a PMD report (you will need to substitute the properties according to your project structure):

<target name="create-pmd-report" description="Generates a PMD report">

    <fail unless="target.reports.pmd" message="target.reports.pmd not set"/>

    <delete dir="${target.reports.pmd}"/>
    <mkdir  dir="${target.reports.pmd}"/>

    <pmd rulesetfiles="src/main/resources/pmd/ruleset.xml">

        <formatter type="xml" toFile="${target.reports.pmd}/pmd-report.xml" linkPrefix="${src.main}/"/>

        <fileset dir="${src.main}">
            <include name="**/*.java"/>
        </fileset>

    </pmd>

    <xslt
        in="${target.reports.pmd}/pmd-report.xml"
        style="${pmd.home}/etc/xslt/pmd-report.xslt"
        out="${target.reports.pmd}/pmd-report.html"
    />

</target>