Ellison

What is Ellison?

Ellison is a SonarQube plugin that checks your JSF (JavaServer Faces) 1.2 pages for potential errors in the Expression Language (part of JSP 2.1) expressions.

What problems with Expression Language expressions does it check?

Ellison checks the following things:

• Syntax errors in EL expressions

• References to undeclared named beans

  This means that it will raise a SonarQube violation when an expression refers to a bean that cannot be found. The type of beans that Ellison can find are the ones declared with:

  • @ManagedBean attributes (with and without explicit naming)
  • faces-config.xml (the JSF configuration file)
  • pseudo-beans from properties files (as declared in faces-config.xml)

How do I install Ellison?

To install Ellison, you must first have installed SonarQube itself. You can obtain a copy of SonarQube from its website.

The versions of SonarQube Ellison has been tested against are:

• 2.14
• 3.1.1
• 3.3.2
• 3.4.1

It may or may not work with other versions.

Once you have SonarQube running, get a copy of this repository. From within the directory you cloned this repository to, do the following: mvn package

Once this command has completed, copy ellison-sonar-plugin/ellison-sonar-plugin-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar to the following directory within the SonarQube installation directory: extensions/plugins.

Restart SonarQube, and Ellison should be installed. All you need to do now is add the Ellison rules to your quality profile, and analyze your project with SonarQube!

How do I get support?

There is official support channel for Ellison, but you can still get some help through one of the following ways:

• The SonarQube user mailing list (make sure to subscribe!)
• The Github issues for this project