[Bug] `com.android.application` plugin is not detected properly inside Gradle plugin block about appcenter

[patniko]

Hi @lacasseio - is this related to [#34]?

[lacasseio]

I would say it's two issues. As for this issue, we only revert the plugin block to apply plugin: and the detection started to work again.

[patniko]

Still having an issue? Having a hard time telling if this is an SDK issue or related to our build service so I can get the right person from our team to take a look.

[matthiaswenz]

Hi @lacasseio this looks like a detection limitation in our repository analysis for Android projects. Can you help me understand the file structure of your repository?
i.e. did you put the plugins { ... } block containing the Android application plugin inside of the same build.gradle file?

[lacasseio]

The plugins { ... } block was put inside the android/app/build.gradle file instead of the apply from:. Basically, a Gradle plugin can be either applied using those two methods, the plugins block becoming the standard way. You should be able to query the applied plugin using the Gradle tooling API instead of doing String parsing if you aren't already doing so. The main reason is the build script not support both Groovy (build.gradle) and Kotlin (build.gradle.kts). I don't know if the later is supported as we reverted those chance to avoid any issue with React-Native upgrade tools.

[lacasseio]

@patniko This issue seems to be related to the detection algorithm used. I have no idea of finding out where this detection happens.

[lacasseio]

I would actually be nice to have some sort of generic way to give the right information to Appcenter as we would like to standardize around Gradle for anything that is build related. As Gradle knows everything about our build, we can communicate what's the important information.

[matthiaswenz]

@lacasseio Thanks for the input, I might have been out of touch with Android development recently

the plugins block becoming the standard way

do you have a source for this? When I create a new project in Android Studio 3.3 it still uses the apply plugin: syntax. That said, we should have a way to also detect the plugins block with our current analysis.

Use of the Tooling API is at this current time limited for us because of the way we are restricted to access your repository for analysis - we basically use the API of the repository provider to get the structure. Otherwise we would basically have to clone the entire repository to run the analysis, which has a lot of new implications, analysis performance being a top concern.

[lacasseio]

Yeah, good point. I guess you have to do string parsing.

I manually modified the source. I'm a Gradle engineer so I was trying to apply the best practice to the build script and found out this limitation. There may be others as well that I haven't found or decided not to venture further. The entire React-Native is very sensitive to the default structure as well.

[matthiaswenz]

Cool, thanks a lot for allowing us to future proof our analysis by sharing this. We greatly appreciate it!

[nilofer]

@lacasseio unfortunately this is a limitation for now. We'll take a look at this as an improvement in the future.