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Sunday, 1 November 2020

Giving the CLI Scanner the GUI Treatment

Introduction

As I've written about in recent posts, I'm using the Salesforce CLI Scanner to perform static code analysis on a number of my projects. As it's clearly part of my day to day use of the Salesforce CLI, I decided to add it to my CLI GUI.  

TL;DR, pull the latest code from the Github repository, or clone it and follow the instructions to carry out the initial setup. When it starts up you'll have the Scanner command group.

Commands

I added the scanner as a new command group, with a couple of commands - listing the rules and running the scanner.

Listing Rules

Listing the rules is fairly straightforward as I used existing parameter types to capture the categories and language, should the user wish to provide them:



and only needed to include a function to process the return JSON to extract the rule details and dump them to the log panel:


Running the Scanner


Running the scanner was a little more complex. First, I usually want to pick the categories but I don't want to have to remember the exact names, so I needed a mechanism to allow me to select from list of options. I've got a good start for this around allowing the user to choose which log file to retrieve from the Debugging command group. Under the hood I run the scanner:rule:list command, process the output to extract the unique category names, then build a select element using the categories as options. As I can choose multiple options I set the multiple attribute and give it a size of 7.  I don't always want to choose though, so I didn't want to have to wait every time for the command to run, so I gave myself a button to click:



I also typically want to open the file that the output is sent to, so I added this capability too:




Aside from this, most of my effort went into figuring out how to pass enquoted parameters to the scanner:run command (to define the targets, for example) on MacOS and Windows 10. I learned, for example, that Node's execFileSync will not spawn a shell to run the command thus any spaces I provide will be assumed to be different arguments to be passed to the command, regardless of any quotes that I might add in a futile attempt to influence it. execSync, on the other hand, will spawn a shell which will know that an enquoted string is a single parameter, allowing the command to succeed. I wouldn't be surprised if there is still the odd issue around this in there, so if you find one let me know by raising an issue at the Github repo.


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