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Java Forum / General / November 2005Eclipse - plugin to find unused CLASS MEMBER VARIABLES?
I've recently been looking for some tools to help partly automate a pretty labourious process of doing a big batch of code reviews. Very happy with the ones I've found so far (PMD, CheckStyle and an obscure plugin to find unused classes at http://seessle.de/dclj/de.seessle. eclipse tools.zip ). Would recommend them to anyone! :-) But there's one thing that none of them seem to do - find public or protected class member variables that aren't used within the whole project. (The nearest to donig this is that PMD will find variables that are declared within a particular class but not used in it - but this isn't quite what I want as there seem to be quite a few constants that aren't referenced anywhere within the project). Does anyone know if such a tool exists, ideally for eclipse but if none exists then I'd consider using a non-eclipse based one... Thanks for any help / suggestions.... Cheers, Steve > But there's one thing that none of them seem to do - find public or > protected class member variables that aren't used within the whole > project. (The nearest to donig this is that PMD will find variables > that are declared within a particular class but not used in it - but > this isn't quite what I want as there seem to be quite a few constants > that aren't referenced anywhere within the project). I don't know of any such tool personally, but try looking for whole-program optimisers, which often detect such cases. You may or may not be able to persuade one to list the stuff it removes. Also check out obfuscators which (AFAIK) quite often do the same kinds of optimisation. Or I could write one for you if you liked, but it'd co$$$t you ;-) BTW, you won't be able to find unused constants (by which I take it you mean static final int/bool/String fields initialised to constant values), since uses of such fields are inlined by the compiler and so would all show up as "unused" by any byte-code-level analyser. You may be able to find a source-level analyser that would do the job, but I wouldn't say much for your chances of finding one that works well since source-level analysis is /much/ harder than bytecode level (especially since Java5). Probably the easiest thing is just to comment-out any suspicious constant and see if the build breaks... -- chris Cheers for the quick reply Chris. Will have a look for an obfuscator. As for writing one, unfortunately I'm a lowly programmer in this company and am pretty sure I wouldn't be able to convince them to spend anything (they're trying to use free stuff where possible, hence the tools I've mentioned :-). Maybe my best bet is manually go through them all using Eclipse's references finder on each constant to find out whether it's used or not in the project or workspace. Best regards, Steve > Cheers for the quick reply Chris. Will have a look for an obfuscator. > As for writing one, unfortunately I'm a lowly programmer in this [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > all using Eclipse's references finder on each constant to find out > whether it's used or not in the project or workspace. Actually, Chris's approach may be faster: just comment out every variable you're not sure is being used and then see if the code will compile. Then uncomment everything that raises an error message. When you finally get a clean compile, you know you've got all the variables that are being used. Then, go through your source and delete all those commented variables. This is still likely to be a time-consuming process if you have many classes and many suspect variables but it may still be cheaper than writing something which does the same thing. Or not. Rhino >Maybe my best bet is manually go through them >all using Eclipse's references finder on each constant to find out >whether it's used or not in the project or workspace. Another approach would work this. You use a class file library (see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jasm.html) to parse all the class files for references and definitions and squirt them into a flat file to sort alphabetically by fully qualified signature name and dedup. Now look for definitions without references or vice versa and research them. You might need an external sort to deal with the volume. See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/sort.html  SignatureCanadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching. > BTW, you won't be able to find unused constants (by which I take it you mean > static final int/bool/String fields initialised to constant values), since uses [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > finding one that works well since source-level analysis is /much/ harder than > bytecode level (especially since Java5). It's worth noting that, in the context of an Eclipse plugin, you have access to the Eclipse JDT's parse tree representation of the source code. That makes this considerably easier than it might seem. I don't know if you can programmatically invoke the References->In Workspace function... but if so, then the requested plugin becomes almost trivial to write. So, just saying that it might not be as difficult as it sounds to write this things from scratch, because Eclipse has most of the tools that you need. Signaturewww.designacourse.com The Easiest Way To Train Anyone... Anywhere. Chris Smith - Lead Software Developer/Technical Trainer MindIQ Corporation Free MagazinesGet these publications absolutely FREE for up to 12 months. There are no hidden fees and no obligation. Simply choose a title, complete the application form and submit it. Read more ...
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