Not able to exclude some rules from PMD

Question

I'm just trying to add PMD to my Spring Boot project but I'm facing some issues trying to exclude some rules from category/java/errorprone.xml ruleset.

I'm using the gradle plugin as follows:

pmd {
    ruleSetConfig = resources.text.fromFile("config/pmd/ruleset.xml")
}

and this is the content of my custom ruleset file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ruleset>
    <rule ref="category/java/bestpractices.xml"></rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/codestyle.xml">
        <exclude name="MethodArgumentCouldBeFinal"/>
        <exclude name="LocalVariableCouldBeFinal"/>
        <exclude name="ControlStatementBraces"/>
        <exclude name="OnlyOneReturn"/>
        <exclude name="ConfusingTernary"/>
        <exclude name="AtLeastOneConstructor"/>
        <exclude name="AvoidFinalLocalVariable"/>
        <exclude name="ShortVariable"/>
        <exclude name="LongVariable"/>
        <exclude name="CommentDefaultAccessModifier"/>
        <exclude name="DefaultPackage"/>
        <exclude name="PrematureDeclaration"/>
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/design.xml">
        <exclude name="LawOfDemeter"/>
        <exclude name="NcssCount"/>
        <exclude name="CyclomaticComplexity"/>
        <exclude name="UseUtilityClass"/>
        <exclude name="AvoidCatchingGenericException"/>
        <exclude name="NPathComplexity"/>
        <exclude name="AvoidRethrowingException"/>
        <exclude name="DataClass"/>
        <exclude name="AvoidThrowingRawExceptionTypes"/>
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/documentation.xml">
        <exclude name="CommentRequired"/>
        <exclude name="UncommentedEmptyConstructor"/>
        <exclude name="CommentSize"/>
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/errorprone.xml">
        <exclude name="BeanMembersShouldSerialize"/>
        <exclude name="DataflowAnomalyAnalysis"/>
        <exclude name="AssignmentInOperand"/>
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/multithreading.xml">
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/performance.xml">
        <exclude name="AvoidInstantiatingObjectsInLoops"/>
    </rule>
    <rule ref="category/java/security.xml">
    </rule>
</ruleset>

As you can see there, I'm excluding both BeanMembersShouldSerializeand DataflowAnomalyAnalysis but I'm still getting these errors in the PMD report:

Found non-transient, non-static member. Please mark as transient or provide accessors.

`Found 'DU'-anomaly for variable 'userEntity' (lines '28'-'38').``

I'm using PMD version 6.10.0 (December 9th 2018).

Any help would be really appreciated.

Regards

Answer 1

Gradle defaults to using the basic and braces rulesets up to Gradle 5. Gradle 5 defaults to using the errorprone category.

You need to clear out these defaults if you don't want them by doing:

pmd {
    ruleSets = [] 
}

https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.plugins.quality.Pmd.html#org.gradle.api.plugins.quality.Pmd:ruleSets