formatters.md

Concept of formatters

The formatters goal is to allow to extract the logic around the representation of each rubycritic run from the gathering of results. By delegating to a formatter you can write your own custom report for rubycritic and being independent on the logic.

Formatters interface

The formatters are nothing more than a class similar to those on report/generator. The report generator must accept an array of analysed_modules when initialized, and respond to #generate_report, for example:

class MyFormatter
  def initialize(analysed_modules)
    ..
    @analysed_modules = analysed_modules
    ..
  end

  def generate_report
    .. # do whatever you want with the analysed_modules model
  end
end

The results will be passed through the analysed_modules_collection class. The generate_report method is called to actually generate the report.

Examples

Badges

See rubycritic-small-badge. This badge could look as follows:

Formatter Classloading

With classname

In order to load the formatter class as part of the Raketask the following approach can be followed. Basically the require of the formatter class needs to happen somewhere before the RubyCritic::RakeTask is defined.

When rubycritic is run, the formatter class is automatically loaded if the formatter parameter represents the fully qualified classname of the formatter class. Taking the above example and combining it with the Rakefile could look as follows:

...
require 'my_formatter'
RubyCritic::RakeTask.new do |task|
  ..
  task.options = %(--custom-format MyFormatter)
  ..
end

See the Rakefile for rubycritic-small-badge

With classname and classpath

When rubycritic is called outside of the structure that has to be criticized with just calling the command. The path to load as well, as the fully qualified classname of the formatter, have to be passed. This happens with the --custom-format option followed by the path to require (requirepath) a : as a separator and the fully qualified classname. An example could look as follows:

gem install my_formatter_gem
rubycritic --custom-format my_formatter:MyFormatter

This will do the same as above.