Analyze target does not work correctly when only using a constant defined in a different module

I also could reproduce the problem.

I have been a little bit in depth.
I found that it's not working only if it's an attribute (final static)

For instance if I have a static final attribute, it does not work

public static final String MSG = "Hello World";

[INFO] [dependency:analyze]
[WARNING] Unused declared dependencies found:
[WARNING]    test.multimodules:module1:jar:1.0-SNAPSHOT:compile

But on the other hand, if I have a static property it works.

public static String MSG = "Hello World";

[INFO] [dependency:analyze]
[INFO] No dependency problems found

Find in attachment my test analyze project : analyze.zip

As stated in Clarifications and Amendments to the JLS, Class Initialization, a Java compiler must replace any references to a compile-time constant with a copy of its value. Hence, an analysis of the mere bytecode as done by the plugin via ASM cannot detect such dependencies.

Yes, this sounds like a reasonable work around.

Instead of <ignoredDependencies>, I suggest to use <usedDependencies> to tell the plugin the actual meaning of the dependency. This allows the plugin to correctly create the analysis right from the beginning instead of post-processing the initial analysis. For example, this also allows to detect the case of an used but undeclared dependency as sketched below:

project                 uses constant C from dep-b, hence dep-b should be a declared dependency
+- dep-a:compile
   +- dep-b:compile     defines some constant C

I have a similar problem, if I use only annotations from a certain dependency.

In the case of using "project lombok", I add teh following to the pom.xml

<dependency>
<groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
<artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
<version>0.11.0</version>
</dependency>

I think it's rather typical to use only annotations, if you use "project lombok". So by adding the annotations of the jar to my code:

import lombok.Getter;
import lombok.ToString;

@Getter
@ToString
public class xxxx {
}

the dependency plugins warns about

[WARNING] Unused declared dependencies found:
[WARNING] org.projectlombok:lombok:jar:0.11.0

For now I am using a workaround for this issue: I use the classes once in my code. For example with such a (most of the time) hidden log-statement (here: slf4j):

// Workaround for MDEP-122: Use class once.
LOG.trace("Using constants from {}.", ConstantsClass.class.getName());

I like <usedDependencies> to declare groupId:artifactId (without version) used but not automatically detected by (bytecode) analysis

Notice that if we add such an option, if a dependency is detected by bytecode analysis, it should be reported as a warning (to help people remove such manual declaration)

done in r1400674