Example/Tutorial: Custom Checking with CodeSonar

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Example/Tutorial: Custom Checking with CodeSonar Plug-Ins

One of the primary uses of CodeSonar plug-ins is for implementing custom checks. Checks implemented in plug-ins can operate directly on CodeSonar's internal representation of a program: this approach is more powerful than that provided by the Extension API, but checks can be more difficult to implement. For a side-by-side comparison of the two approaches, see Extending CodeSonar.

This tutorial illustrates the plug-in approach with two custom checks.

CodeSonar SaaS Note: If you want to use your own custom plug-ins with CodeSonar SaaS, contact CodeSecure support for assistance. The installation instructions provided in this page are not sufficient to make plug-ins available to SaaS analyses.

We have provided source code for two small example plug-ins.

Part One	A check for variable names containing upper case characters.
Part Two	A check for mismatched square and round parentheses in the output of a program.

Part One

A check for variable names containing upper case characters.

Part Two

A check for mismatched square and round parentheses in the output of a program.

There are versions of both plug-ins for each supported API language: C++, Python, and C. You can experiment with any or all of the of the plug-ins: note that if you install multiple versions of the "same" plug-in, every problem will be flagged multiple times.

Note

In this section (and throughout this manual), $CSONAR indicates the CodeSonar installation directory.

If you have defined environment variable CSONAR to the location of the CodeSonar installation directory, you can use $CSONAR directly in your command lines. On Windows systems, use %CSONAR% in place of $CSONAR.
If you don't want to use environment variables, replace $CSONAR with the path to your CodeSonar installation directory before using the command lines.

Getting Started

To get started:

Copy the following files to a working directory.

testvar.c : A small program that exercises the upper-case check plug-in (tutorial Part One).
callseq_sample.c : An extremely small program that exercises the parenthesis check plug-in (tutorial Part Two).

Decide which API language you wish to use.

Copy the corresponding plug-in source file to the working directory, and go on to the language-specific part of the tutorial.

API language	Plug-in Source Files		Go on to...
API language	Part One	Part Two	Go on to...
C++	UCvar_plugin.cpp	callseq_plugin.cpp	Plug-In API Tutorial: C++ Version
Python	UCvar_plugin.py	callseq_plugin.py	Plug-In API Tutorial: Python Version
C	UCvar_plugin.c	callseq_plugin.c	Plug-In API Tutorial: C Version