Suppressing FindBugs Warnings

A few days ago I spoke with my friend, Tomek, about suppressing FindBugs warnings. Here is brief summary of our conversation, which may be interesting for you.

There is one simple method for suppressing the FindBugs warnings - usage of edu.umd.cs.findbugs.annotations.SuppressWarnings annotation. Just add it in the place where FindBugs reported problem, and use the appropriate bug code.

You should start by adding com.google.code.findbugs:annotations:2.0.0 jar to the project dependencies. Then open the bug reported by FindBugs, and find its code, like in this example:

Finally add something like this to the method holding the code marked by FindBugs:

That's all, clear the FindBugs markers, and run it again, the problem will not be reported in this place again.

Nice! Isn't it? - No, it isn't :( - Why you may ask? - Because there is another annotation in java.lang package with exactly the same name (!), used for suppressing different kind of warnings. Shouldn't it be used instead? - Well ...

Another question is if we want to add another jar to the project dependencies just for suppressing FindBugs warnings - thank God the FindBugs authors marked this annotation with retention policy 'CLASS', which means the jar will not be required when running the project (ex. in web application container).