Suppress FindBugs warning in static initializer

Question

I have a static initializer where I am creating a new File object. When I pass in the name to it FindBugs reports a warning due to the hard-coded absolute path. How can I suppress this warning?

private static final String fileName = "/tmp/m123.txt";
static {
    if (new File(fileName).exists()) {
        ....
    }
}

Answer 1

You could move this hard-coded filename to a properties file, or command line argument etc.

See this page for a tutorial on property files http://www.mkyong.com/java/java-properties-file-examples/

In you want to ignore this warning though as per the page findbugs.sourceforge.net/manual/running.html#commandLineOptions you can use -exclude filterFile.xml

Answer 2

You can use ENUM, I use ENUM to eliminate hardcoding of the strings/text both findbugs and pmd doesn't to show errors or warning.

public enum MyFiles {

    FILE_NAME("/kp/kp1/kp2.tx");

    private String value;

    MyFiles(String value){

        this.value = value;

    }

Your fileName is not uppercase, hence pmd would show error of type 1 for the same. So change it to upper case

private static final String FILE_NAME = "/tmp/m123.txt"

Answer 3

Normally I wouldn't advocate refactoring code too much to avoid warnings, but in this case you're stuck because you cannot annotate static initializers. You can move the code to a static method in another class which you may annotate with SuppressFBWarnings.

public class MainClass {
    private static final String FILE_NAME = "/tmp/m123.txt";

    static {
        HelperClass.loadFile(FILE_NAME);
    }
}

public class HelperClass {
    @SuppressFBWarnings("DMI_HARDCODED_ABSOLUTE_FILENAME")
    public static void loadFile(String fileName) {
        if (new File(fileName).exists()) {
            ....
        }
    }
}

Extracting the code may actually be enough to avoid the warning, but I've never encountered this warning before.