CustomInputFormats.md

Supporting other static analysis tools or output formats

If the static analysis tool or output format is not currently supported there are 3 options:

• The simplest thing is to write a script to convert the tool's output to the SARB format (see below).
• Add support to SARB by creating a ResultsParser.
• See if the tool will add support for the SARB format.

Write a script to convert tool's output to the SARB format

The output from tool is piped into the converter (e.g. tool2sarb) which is then piped into SARB:

tool | tool2sarb | sarb create tool.baseline

This example will show how to write a simple PHP script to convert ESLint's JSON format to the SARB format.

Here is a snippet from ESLint's JSON output...

[
  {
    "filePath": "/var/lib/jenkins/workspace/Releases/eslint Release/eslint/fullOfProblems.js",
    "messages": [
      {
        "ruleId": "no-unused-vars",
        "severity": 2,
        "message": "'addOne' is defined but never used.",
        "line": 1,
        "column": 10,
        "nodeType": "Identifier",
        "messageId": "unusedVar",
        "endLine": 1,
        "endColumn": 16
      } ,
      ... next issue in file ...
    ]
  }, 
  ... next file ...
]

The SARB format is JSON. For each issue the following information is needed:

SARB field name	Description	Field mapped to in ESLint's output
file	Full path to file	filePath
line	Line number of issue	line
type	Type of issue (e.g. rule that was violated	ruleId
message	Human readable description of problem	message

The script needs to do the following:

1. Read JSON input from STDIN
2. Convert JSON to an array
3. Loop through the outer array (which has an entry for each file)
4. Loop through the messages for each file to get the file's issues.
5. Add these to an array of issues.
6. Output array of issues as JSON.

<?php
// See `example/eslint2sarb.php`

// 1. Read JSON input from STDIN 
$inputData = stream_get_contents(STDIN);
if ($inputData === false) die("Could not read input");

// 2.Convert JSON to an array 
$asJson = json_decode($inputData, true);
if (!is_array($asJson)) die ("Could not parse JSON");

$issues = [];

// 3. Loop through the outer array (which has an entry for each file) 
foreach($asJson as $fileWithIssues) {

    $fileName = $fileWithIssues['filePath'];

    // 4. Loop through the `messages` for each file to get the file's issues. 
    foreach($fileWithIssues['messages'] as $issue) {
    
        // 5. Add these to an array of issues.
        $issues[] = [
            'file' => $fileName,
            'line' => $issue['line'],
            'type' => $issue['ruleId'],
            'message' => $issue['message'],
        ];
    }
}

// 6. Output array of issues as JSON. 
echo json_encode($issues, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);

Combining simple scripts like the above to convert to the SARB format gives you the ability to use almost any tool for any language.