To be as helpful as possible to the Jalopy developer team and other users, you should use the bug tracker database that the Jalopy project maintains on the SourceForge web site. You do need to be a SourceForge member to post a bug report.

Before posting a bug report, spend a few moments searching the bug database to see if a similar report has already been made. The bug tracker has a search facility that will let you search for bug reports using a variety of criteria. If you find a similar bug report, and you have additional information to contribute, post a comment to the report. Only if you do not find a similar bug report, submit a new one.

The web form in the bug tracker report provides several fields for submitting information. If you are unsure about a particular item, leave it at the default setting provided in the form.

The more important fields are “Category”, “Summary” and the “Initial comment”.

When you write your initial comment describing the bug, you should specify the versions of Jalopy, the Plug-in environment, the Java platform and operating system you are using.

Be as specific as possible. If you encounter stack traces, attach them. If you have problems formatting a specific file, locate the cause of the error and attach the code section as a text file. Also attach your code convention as many errors only occur with a certain settings combination.

A more typical example should look like:

I newly installed jalopy-1.0b9 on Windows NT with German locales, Sun JDK 1.3.1_05.
I upgraded property file from jalopy-1.0b7 via Import/Export.

When starting the jalopy settings dialog, I always have problems
when I am on the "Sorting" panel. No entries are shown. Maybe
this is a similar problem.

I tried with different files. Always the same result.

Using the Ant task (0.3.3 with Ant 1.4.1), I get a stack trace as attached. I attached
my code convention also.

The attached stack trace could read as follows:

[jalopy] Jalopy Java Source Code Formatter 1.0b9
[jalopy] Format 1 source file
[jalopy] X:\beans\booking\BookingService.java:0:0:
Parse
[jalopy] X:\beans\booking\BookingService.java:0:0:parsing took 170
[jalopy] X:\beans\booking\BookingService.java:0:0:transform
[jalopy] X:\beans\booking\BookingService.java:0:0:
java.lang.NullPointerException
[jalopy] java.lang.NullPointerException
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.Transformation.addSiblings(Transformation.java:167)
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.Transformation.sortDeclarations(Transformation.java:534)
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.Transformation.sort(Transformation.java:104)
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.Transformation.apply(Transformation.java:64)
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.JavaRecognizer.transform(JavaRecognizer.java:451)
at de.hunsicker.jalopy.lang.JavaRecognizer.getParseTree(Java Recognizer.java:173)

The given information made it quite obvious that the auto-conversion of the code convention format from 1.0b7 to 1.0b9 failed for some reason.

Looking further at the supplied code convention revealed that the value of the sorting key was invalid and the actual cause was easy to spot.