[Soot-list] Eclipse ColorTags Disappearing

[Eric Bodden]

Jack, I had another look at this yesterday.

It seems like the culprit is the AnnotationPainter in Eclipse. Here's
what's happening:

You analyze your code with the Soot plugin. The plugin then adds its
color annotations to the text widget that holds the analyzed program
text. This process notifies the eclipse JDT framework that the content
of that widget was changed. This in turn then causes the widget to get
"reconciled", which triggers the AnnotationPainter to (re)paint its
warning annotations for the code in that widget. (This basically
generates the yellow squiggles for warnings.) When this happens, the
AnnotationPainter replaces any formatting that the Soot plugin may
have introduced, basically trampling over everything that the Soot
plugin may have done, but ONLY for lines that actually contain a
warning.

The proper solution should be to rework the Soot plugin so that it
implements a LineStyleListener. When this is done, then the listener
can effectively customize how warnings are painted, and avoid the
"yellow squiggles trampling over the color annotations".

In the meantime, I believe for you project you should simply get away
with disabling all of Eclipse's warnings. Then the color tags should
show up just fine.

Eric

2008/12/14 Jack Griffith <jg205 at doc.ic.ac.uk>:
> Hi Eric,
>
> I am working on my final year project for my masters degree, and being able
> to visualise the results of my analysis through colours would be extremely
> valuable for me. I appreciate that you may have more urgent matters, but I
> would really value any time spent towards fixing this in the near future!
>
> I find it odd that this would work a week or two ago, and on the (presumably
> same as I am using the same versions) software there is now an issue?
>
> Thanks once again,
> Jack
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: eric.bodden at googlemail.com [mailto:eric.bodden at googlemail.com] On
> Behalf Of Eric Bodden
> Sent: 14 December 2008 22:50
> To: Jack Griffith
> Cc: soot-list at sable.mcgill.ca
> Subject: Re: [Soot-list] Eclipse ColorTags Disappearing
>
> Hi Jack.
>
> So far all I can tell you is that I can reproduce the problem. When
> you (de)select a tag kind on the Analysis tab then the color tags are
> quickly shown again, but not for long. The weirdest thing is that the
> color tag for "World" is shown in green for me all the time. But all
> the other tags seem to disappear again instantaneously.
>
> The Soot plugin is unfortunately of very bad code quality and it would
> take me some time to debug this. Does this bug hold you back from
> anything important? If not I would like to ask you to open a bug
> report in our bugzilla so that we can look into it at some later
> point.
>
> Eric
>
> 2008/12/14 Jack Griffith <jg205 at doc.ic.ac.uk>:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am experimenting with ColorTags in Eclipse, and I seem to have
>> encountered a problem. The tags appear correctly for a brief second,
>> then almost all of them disappear!
>>
>> I thought this was a problem with my implementation of tagging, but I
>> now seem to have the same problem with the built-in NullPointerColourer
>> as well, whereas I did not last week! I have made a fresh installation
>> of eclipse and soot since my last test, perhaps this has had some
>> influence on the outcome?
>>
>> For instance, the only ColorTags that persist in the test program below
>> (when running the built-in NullPointerColorer) are:
>>        1. BLUE tag on String[] args (indicating nullness unknown)
>>        2. GREEN tag on "World" (indicating not null)
>>
>> public class Test
>> {
>>    public static void main(String[] args)
>>    {
>>        String str1 = null;
>>        String str2 = "Hello";
>>
>>        String str3 = null;
>>        String str4 = "World";
>>    }
>> }
>>
>> The Soot analysis I run is:
>>
>> soot.Main --f J --p jap.npcolorer enabled:true --polyglot
>> --d .../Project/workspace/SimpleBodyTransformer/sootOutput --cp ...
>> --keep-line-number --xml-attributes --src-prec java Test
>>
>> I think the crucial point is that all ColorTag's appear correctly very
>> briefly, then disappear!
>>
>> I would really appreciate any insights on this problem.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Jack
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Soot-list mailing list
>> Soot-list at sable.mcgill.ca
>> http://mailman.cs.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/soot-list
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Eric Bodden
> Sable Research Group, McGill University
> Montréal, Québec, Canada
>
>



-- 
Eric Bodden
Sable Research Group, McGill University
Montréal, Québec, Canada