Ignores and Excludes do nothing

I am having the exact same issue. I cannot get Cobertura to exclude or ignore. The documentation is sparse and very poor for beginners. Can somebody get on this? My management is on my tail trying to get unwanted packages removed from the coverage reports.

I believe this problem has something to do with a corrupted cobertura.ser file. I somehow got it to work, i.e. it was excluding the proper packages and classes. Since I had a number of exclude statements, I tried to isolate the exclude rules that were getting it to work. It just kept working until I took out all of the rules, then, of course nothing was excluded as expected. I then started putting rules back in until all were back but it still didn't work! I I figured there had to be some sort of caching optimization – something that was keeping track of the previous rules. I took a wild guess and blew away the cobertura.ser file in $

and it started working again! When it was bad, the cobertura.ser was 544K in size. When it was good, its size was only 164K.

I can only conclude that there is a bug here and that it has to do with what is written to the cobertura.ser file.
As a workaround, I would suggest blowing away your cobertura.ser file (noting the file's size) and then trying it again. It should work – take a note of the new file's size-- as long as your excludes are correct.

I took a look at the code for this plugin with regards to the issue here. There is InstrumentTaskTest which has very limited tests for configuration.

I tried to add the following to the testConfig method so that it now looks like this:

    public void testConfig() throws Exception
    {
        ConfigInstrumentation config = new ConfigInstrumentation();
        String demoIgnore = "org.codehaus.mojo.cobertura.demo.*";
        String moreIgnore = "org.codehaus.mojo.cobertura.moredemo.*";
        config.addIgnore(demoIgnore);
        config.addIgnore(moreIgnore);

        task.setConfig( config );

        assertEquals( config, task.getConfig() );

        task.execute();
        assertFalse(task.getCmdLineArgs().getArgs().isEmpty());
        assertEquals("--ignore", task.getCmdLineArgs().getArgs().get(0));
        assertEquals(demoIgnore, task.getCmdLineArgs().getArgs().get(1));
        assertEquals("--ignore", task.getCmdLineArgs().getArgs().get(2));
        assertEquals(moreIgnore, task.getCmdLineArgs().getArgs().get(3));
    }

As you see from the test that this plugin will add a new --ignore for each ignore configuration that is included. Can anyone say something with regards to if this is correct or not?

This link shows a different kind of POM configuration. Is it "too old" to be right anymore or is he actually right?
http://markmail.org/message/qnaxkfnumfojcmmg

I think the <ignore> statement is rather confusing – instead of ignoring entire methods in custom classes, just single method calls within custom methods are filtered out (e.g. logging statements in your methods). So, if entire methods from your classes should be excluded (e.g. when they cannot be tested) in favor of getting a higher code coverage rate, it just would not be possible.

We patched Cobertura and the Maven-Cobertura-Plugin such that entire methods can now be excluded from instrumentation. If you're interested, add ftp://el4.elca-services.ch/htdocs/el4j/maven2repository/ to your mirrors, and use it as follows:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
    <artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2-el4j_20080702_1630</version>
    <configuration>
        <instrumentation>
            <!-- Ignore entire methods from being instrumented. -->
            <ignoreMethods>
                <!-- Ignore all methods ending with Untested from
                the com.yourcompany package. -->
                <ignoreMethod>com.yourcompany.*.*Untested</ignoreMethod>
            </ignoreMethods>
        </instrumentation>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Note that it is also possible to e.g. ignoring setter and getter method, by configuring

<ignoreMethods>
    <!-- Ignore all setter and getter methods in your classes -->
    <ignoreMethod>com.yourcompany.*.set*</ignoreMethod>
    <ignoreMethod>com.yourcompany.*.get*</ignoreMethod>
</ignoreMethods>

I am working with the Cobertura 2.4 plugin and this issue still remains. When I put in excludes they are completely ignored.

same type of issue as mentioned above. To get an accurate report, i need to exclude some packages. If there is a workaround, please post. If i cannot get these packages excluded I will have to go to another tool (emma or clover)

I don't suppose the person who made the patch is still listening and can attach the patch?

This appears to still be a problem 5 years later. I've been trying to exclude calls to common logging from instrumentation but it seems to have no effect. Reports and checks still pick up the log calls as relevant. The config I am using looks like:

<plugins>
	<plugin>
		<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
		<artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
		<configuration>
			<quiet>false</quiet>
			<instrumentation>
				<ignores>
					<ignore>org.apache.commons.logging.*</ignore>
				</ignores>
			</instrumentation>
			<check>
			...
			</check>
		</configuration>
	</plugin>
<plugins>

I've traced through the plugin and verified that it is sending an ignores parameter to the cobertura program, so I think that they plugin is not at fault unless it is doing something else that invalidates the ignore parameter. This is very frustrating.

I am working with the Cobertura 2.5.1 plugin and this issue still remains. When I put in excludes they are completely ignored.

This patch fixes this issue (for my simple test case).

I would really like to create a test case for it and have it reviewed before I commit it.

2nd version of the patch: I added a test case.

This class is really hard to test, so I made a few changes to ease testing. However, a project maintainer should review this and:

a) Either confirm the test or suggest an alternative location for it

b) Suggest the relevant integration test where this test should be

Use most recent patch - it has an updated IT test in project mcobertura-52

Forgot source classes in previous patch

The exclude is not a problem (anymore), the ignore is. Let's first figure out why there are two options which kind of do the same thing based on the name.

According to http://maven.40175.n5.nabble.com/Cobertura-what-is-ignore-used-for-in-maven-I-don-t-see-it-mentioned-td114935.html :

"I'm guessing that ignore will still measure the coverage, but if you are enforcing a minimum coverage number, that package will be ignored. Exclude will not even bother measuring the coverage "

I figured out the difference: include/exclude has to do with the files to instrument.
According to the docs of Cobertura

It's a shame there's no example. I'll have to search for that, add a FAQ entry for it and document it better in the code.

Fixed in rev. 15530
The excludes was already fixed somewhere in the past. I've added a FAQ entry about the meaning of ignores.

Folks,

I can see that this is fixed in 2.6 according to this issue. When is this version going to be officially available? http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/ only has versions up to 2.5.1 but not 2.6.

Also it seems that includes don't work E.g. shouldn't the following work effectively as an exclude? I.e. if I have com.foo.pkg1 and com.foo.pkg2, shouldn't the below only instrument pkg1 and leave pkg2 not included?

<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<instrumentation>
<includes>
<include>com/foo/pkg1/*.class</include>
</includes>
</instrumentation>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>clean</id>
<phase>pre-site</phase>
<goals>
<goal>clean</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>instrument</id>
<phase>site</phase>
<goals>
<goal>instrument</goal>
<goal>cobertura</goal>
<goal>check</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>