Empty xml report with checkstyle

[Quantumplation]

Bug Report

• TSLint version: 3.11.0
• TypeScript version: 1.8.10
• Running TSLint via: CLI

./node_modules/.bin/tslint src/**/*.ts --exclude **/*-spec.ts -o ./_lint/report.xml -t checkstyle

Actual behavior

File report.xml is created, but is empty

Expected behavior

File report.xml should have contents, something like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<checkstyle version="4.3">
</checkstyle>

My build server fails because the produced file is invalid XML

[adidahiya]

Do you get any failures reported with other formatters? Try quoting your globs in the CLI ('src/**/*.ts', etc.). If the linter is getting files and reporting zero failures but not outputting any XML, this sounds like a bug (see these tests).

[Quantumplation]

If I introduce a linting violation, the command (unchanged) produces a valid checkstyle xml file, it's only when there are no linting errors in the project.

EDIT: Just checked, quoting my globs doesn't fix the issue.

[caugner]

Same problem and expectation (cf. initial comment) here.

[jkillian]

This seems like a general TSLint w/ regards to formatters and not just an issue with the checkstyle one. If there are no violations, nothing gets written to stdout.

I'm not sure why this is the current behavior, I'm up for changing this unless anyone can think of a reason why it's better as it is now.

[caugner]

I'm up for changing this unless anyone can think of a reason why it's better as it is now.

I agree with this change, because the current behavior makes the wrong assumption that formatters don't need to emit anything on success.

It should be noted that custom formatters could potentially make use of this assumption and report a failure even on success (e.g. if the reporter prints "There were N failures: (...)" and CI checks for the string There were [0-9]+ failures). As this is only a hypothetical problem and the included standard formatters are not affected by this, it should suffice to note this in the release notes, so that users with this issue have a higher chance of quickly resolving it.

[caugner]

This issue also affects the pmd reporter.

[jkillian]

The exit status code provides a better way to indicate success/failure that the textual output of a formatter anyways. I'd say that the current behavior is broken, so let's fix this!

[Quantumplation]

Any update on this?

[jkillian]

This will be addressed by #1472 and will be fixed in the next release of TSLint