Write Excel files with extensive License Information (inc. infos from the JARs)

[Master-Code-Programmer]

For every Open Source Software (OSS) we use, our customer wants an extensive license report.
This plugin is almost perfect for that, except:

• The aggregate-third-party goal writes (although formatable) just text-files
• The aggregate-download-licenses write a nice xml, but with even less information - the project/plugin name is missing.
• But the more important thing: Our customer needs, also with copyleft licensed OSS, the copyright notices for each software. Plus the plugin vendor and similar stuff. Many of these information aren't provided or updated in the plugins pom.xml's while their JARs MANIFEST.MF files are clean, informative and maintained. The JARs can contain:
  ** The MANIFEST.MF with Bundle vendor, implementer, bundle license
  ** Multiple license text files for each license, directly in the JAR, no need to download that. So I'm looking for a LICENSE.txt file and all text files having a SPDX license name.
  ** Also NOTICE.txt files which contain often all relevant copyright information.

So I forked an extension which tries to fetch as much information as it can get from the JAR file and writes that with some pom.xml information, which was previously ignored, to the license.xml file.

This is of course optional, obviously the previous solution was good enough for most people so it's "off" by default (parameter is "extendedInfo", goal is "license:aggregate-download-licenses").

Since the next task would be:
"And now write an excessive amount of XSLT declarations to create a CSV report to import that into Excel, were you would have to pay extra attention so Excel doesn't convert all version numbers to dates, fit all columns, freeze header columns and rows, group them, etc.".
I skipped that part and added an option to write the result into a properly formatted Excel / Calc file (parameter is "writeExcelFile" / "writeCalcFile", the Excel file is better formatted).

And I still need the XML, since I need to parse it periodically and persist it into a database.

Since I wrote this I got E-Mails from people thanking me for this work and how useful it is. I now would like to have this integrated into the original plugin.

I would very much appreciate an acceptance of this pull request.

[slawekjaranowski]

Thanks for PR.
I will try to review in next week.

[Master-Code-Programmer]

Example images of the exported Excel file:

The top header rows and left column are fixed, so they don't scroll when scrolling through the Excel spreadsheet:

Hide columns to increase clarity and focus on what really interests you right now:

[Master-Code-Programmer]

Thanks for PR. I will try to review in next week.

Thanks :-)

Forgot: I kept the "run-one-it" profile to run single integration tests.

I kept it because I needed to run the same test over and over, and not having to run all other tests together with mine, helped increase the development speed immensely. Because all integration tests together, take forever.

[slawekjaranowski]

run-one-it is not needed - you can use:

mvn verify -P run-its -Dinvoker.test=testName

[Master-Code-Programmer]

run-one-it is not needed - you can use:

mvn verify -P run-its -Dinvoker.test=testName

Thanks, tested it, it works, I removed the single-test profile and pushed it to the Pull-Request, reducing its size 👍.

[slawekjaranowski]

for new feature @since tags should be update to 2.4.0

[slawekjaranowski]

Should we also update LicenseSummaryReader?

By the way I don't see documentation about license summary content which is generated ... issue for next PR

[Master-Code-Programmer]

I'm not sure how to answer that.

[slawekjaranowski]

We have xsd for it ... it is manually updated ...
Please look #528

[Master-Code-Programmer]

Got it, I checked the XSD with some IDEs and found many errors, already in the existing XSD. I fixed those old bugs and added my newly written entries to the XSD.

To make sure the bugs don't reappear, I added XML validations against the XSD, to the unit test.

I also added an option that the XSD file is written into the same directory as the XML file is written into, and then gets referenced in the XML file. It's set with <useXsd>true</useXsd>. So the XSD file can easily be used.

[slawekjaranowski]

update current xsd file is enough - please remove useXsd options.

We should replace manual xml writing by Modello - we will have a automatic xsd with documentation generation.
It should be done in separate PR.

[slawekjaranowski]

#529

[Master-Code-Programmer]

update current xsd file is enough - please remove useXsd options.

We should replace manual xml writing by Modello - we will have a automatic xsd with documentation generation. It should be done in separate PR.

I just want you to understand why I added the option. I never knew the XSD was somewhere inside the plugin, as most people I think. But with that option, it becomes very visible and easily usable by everyone.

On the other hand, will (after #529) the then generated XML reference the generated XSD? And how long do you estimate till #529 is implemented?

If you still want the useXsd option removed, I will remove it, without further questions.

[slawekjaranowski]

Please remove useXsd.

As it is open source project, so I don't know when generated XML will be implemented.

I will try to do it in next month unless someone else will do it early.

[Master-Code-Programmer]

@slawekjaranowski:

Please remove useXsd.

Done.

I think all problems are resolved then?

[slawekjaranowski]

@Master-Code-Programmer thanks for you contribution.

[Master-Code-Programmer]

@slawekjaranowski As an afterthought, this is not a must for me, but may I humbly ask that you put me in the contributors list in the pom.xml under

<contributors>
    <contributor>
      <name>Jan-Hendrik Diederich</name>
    </contributor>

? I'm OK if you consider my contribution to be too insignificant to be mentioned.

[slawekjaranowski]

@Master-Code-Programmer Of course your contributions deserves to add you to contributors list.
Please create PR for it.

[Master-Code-Programmer]

@Master-Code-Programmer Of course your contributions deserves to add you to contributors list. Please create PR for it.

Thanks.
Done: It's #534.