Checkstyle 8.42 doesn't work with JavadocMethod.accessModifiers

[remal]

In Checkstyle 8.42 scope property for JavadocMethod and MissingJavadocMethod modules was replaced with accessModifiers (see checkstyle/checkstyle#7417).

I've selected 8.42 as a checkstyle version for the plugin, however, the checkstyle.xml file from attached checkstyle.zip still can't be parsed. I still have this error message:

The Checkstyle rules file could not be parsed.
cannot initialize module TreeWalker - cannot initialize module MissingJavadocMethod - Property 'accessModifiers' does not exist, please check the documentation
The file has been blocked for 60s.

Is there a chance that I broke smth when I manually set checkstyle version to 8.42 in .idea/checkstyle-idea.xml before updating the plugin? If "yes" how it can be debugged and fixed?

I tried to enable debug logging for the plugin, but IDEA log doesn't contain a full Checkstyle exception with its stacktrace.

[jshiell]

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that you haven't broken anything - I can reproduce the problem. And the rules file works correctly with checkstyle-8.42-all.jar, so it appears to be something odd with the plugin.

The bad news - it's highly unlikely that I'll have time to look at it before the weekend, at the earliest.

[jshiell]

Better news - I think this is a problem with your rules file, in particular MissingJavadocMethod - this still appears to have the scope attribute, not accessModifiers.

Source - https://github.com/checkstyle/checkstyle/blob/9456a052d88382854b60877fd9959318b3d87296/src/main/java/com/puppycrawl/tools/checkstyle/checks/javadoc/MissingJavadocMethodCheck.java#L340
Docs - https://checkstyle.sourceforge.io/config_javadoc.html#MissingJavadocMethod

From your file:

    <module name="MissingJavadocMethod">
      <property name="severity" value="ignore"/>
      <property name="accessModifiers" value="public, protected"/>
      <property name="minLineCount" value="2"/>
      <property name="allowedAnnotations" value="Override, Test"/>
      <property name="tokens" value="METHOD_DEF, CTOR_DEF, ANNOTATION_FIELD_DEF"/>
    </module>

If I changed accessModifiers to <property name="scope" value="public"/> then it loads fine.

I've no idea why it doesn't break with checkstyle-8.42-all.jar.

[remal]

Checkstyle 8.42 requires accessModifiers only, not scope. This version of Checkstyle should fail on scope. As you can see in checkstyle/checkstyle@2954d87, the scope property has been completely removed.

BTW my CI job executes Checkstyle 8.42 check successfully. The problem with the IDEA plugin only.

[jshiell]

Your file uses accessModifiers on MissingJavadocMethod, which - as per the source and the docs - does not support it.

Closing as user error.

[remal]

Thank you, you're absolutely right! They changed JavadocMethod, but not MissingJavadocMethod. But I changed both of them modules in my config file. Don't know why CI doesn't fail, btw.

[jshiell]

Yeah, it's pretty weird (and inconsistent - hopefully they'll fix this in a future version). I couldn't get it to fail with the command-line version either - yet looking at the source it really should.