Analysis Page and Warning Reports

In the previous step you built a project, ran the CodeSonar analysis and sent the analysis results to a hub. Now you can view the analysis report.

The analysis may still be under way when you open the analysis page. If this is the case, the page will not be fully populated and the Analysis State bar will not be full. Reload the page to see updated results. Once the analysis is completed, the Analysis State bar will be full and will contain the word Finished.

Analysis Page

You should see a page that looks (something) like this:

This is the analysis page. By default, it will display the Warnings tab, which contains a table of all the warnings issued by the analysis. (The values in the ID column may differ from those shown here.)

1. Click the shaded bar on the left side of the page.

   

   The bar will expand to display the File Explorer. If you select a file in the File Explorer, the contents of each Analysis page tab will update to show only the warnings (or files, or procedures) from that file. If you select a directory, the tabs will show the warnings (files, procedures) from the tree under that directory. This is particularly useful for large projects with many source files and directories. This project only has one file, so you don't need to keep the File Explorer open.

2. Drag the right side of the File Explorer panel leftward to narrow it until it collapses again.

   You will see at a glance that the analysis of BasicProj.c produced several warnings, including two Null Pointer Dereference warnings.

Prioritizing Warnings

Each warning has an associated numerical Score. CodeSonar computes and reports this in order to suggest a review order for warnings: warnings with a higher Score value before warnings with a lower Score value.

1. Inspect the table of warnings in the Analysis page. The first column of this table is Score. Note the following.
   • By default, the table is sorted in descending order by Score. That is, the ordering of rows in the table reflects the suggested review order.
   • An additional review order cue is provided by score coloring: the highest scores have red backgrounds, while lower scores have yellow. (None of the warnings in the example have scores in the green range.)
   Score will typically be a useful factor in determining your warning review order. However, it will not necessarily be the only factor. For example, your organization might specify that all warnings in component A should be reviewed before any warnings in component B, then use Score to set the review order within each component.

   We will review a "Null Pointer Dereference" warning first, even though it doesn't have the highest Score, because it provides a useful introduction to several Warning Report features.

2. Click the table entry for the "Null Pointer Dereference" warning that occurs on line 17.

   This will open a new page.

Warning Report Page

In overview, the warning report page looks (something) like this:

• The report heading contains summary information about the warning.
• An annotated code excerpt shows where and why the warning was issued.
• If any changes have been made to the warning report, there will be a Change History section noting these changes.
• The Change Warning section allows users to add new notes and change some attributes of the warning.

Next

• Go on to A Subtler Null Dereference Example.