Provide option to automatically activate the Sonar Nature when importing a Maven project with M2Eclipse

@Freddy : If my understanding is correct, you'd like Sonar Eclipse to automatically extract the groupId/artifactId(branch) from the maven pom (if exist) and to link the eclipse project to the Sonar project without having to ask anything to the developer ?

Answer from @Dennis : yes that's exactly what we're looking for, although this doesn't have to be in the POM it can be in any config file (sonar.properties).

I'd say if it's in the POM, it should be taken from that. If there is no POM, then look elsewhere. Avoid having to define a separate properties file if you don't have to.

@Julien, if we manage to fix SONARIDE-329, the only remaining work would be to provide the ability to eclipse users to automatically activate the Sonar nature on a new project. Do you know if this is possible ?

There are so many cases where it will not work: several branches, several Sonar instances with the same projects, ... I feel we did the best to make the association process more fluent, but this is not a good thing to try to do it automatically during project import/creation. See what others plugins are doing (m2e, git, svn, ...): they don't try to hook in the import process and user have to manually do the association.

A new feature will be available in Sonar Eclipse update site. This feature is a m2e connector. When installed, each time m2e configure a project (import/update project configuration) then Sonar nature will be set with key = groupId:artifactId[:branch] and Sonar server = first one in configuration.

Also each time pom.xml is modified (groupId/artifactId/sonar.branch) then we try to update Sonar association if necessary. This update is done only when project is associated with Sonar AND sonar project informations were matching Maven infos before pom.xml modification. This is to avoid overwriting user defined association.

I unhappily can't manage to make it work with both Indigo and Juno Julien.

Manually tested !

@Julien, there is just one side effect : the list of violations are not loaded when this first association is done whereas this is the case when the association is done manually.

So violations appear progressively as soon as a source file containing some violation is open.

Currently m2e connector is associating projects without any verification of their existence on the remote Sonar server. If we do a refresh it means there will be blocking error popup if the project has no match on the remote Sonar. It can be a problem when importing a lot of Maven projects at the same time (there will be a lot of error popup to close).
Some proposals:

• unconditionally set projects in local mode when activated by m2e. Let user the responsibility to switch to remote mode.
• validate that project exists on remote Sonar when activated by m2e and then decide about local vs remote mode (use remote when project is found). If remote then refresh violations.
• don't validate, associate in remote mode, then start refresh. Improve refresh job to display a meaningful message when there is no matching remote project

Ok, thanks for this explanation @Julien. In that case we're not going to change this default behavior :

• When a Maven project is open -> the list of Sonar violations is not retrieved
• As soon as a source file containing some violations is open, all related violations are loaded
• At any point of time, a user has the ability to retrieve all violations on pending project by clicking on the "refresh" button in the Violations view

IT added