Individual diagnostics can be hidden from view through suppressions. There are two main mechanisms available:
- Insert instructions into comments in the source code (described in the documentation for the individual analysis tools).
- Define suppressions against the results held in Helix QAC Dashboard (described in the Helix QAC Dashboard documentation).
Suppressions defined within the source code are applied automatically. Suppressions defined within Helix QAC Dashboard need to be downloaded from Helix QAC Dashboard before they can be applied by Helix QAC.
To download suppressions, navigate to the Download Suppressions option in the Helix QAC Dashboard menu.
In the resultant dialog, select the snapshot and click OK to start the download. The suppressions downloaded are those that cause a diagnostic to be suppressed within the chosen snapshot. Because of the ’carry forward’ functionality of Helix QAC Dashboard suppressions, the actual definition of the suppression may come from an earlier snapshot.
Once the suppressions have been downloaded, they will automatically be applied when you view analysis results. Even if you have edited your local source code since the snapshot was uploaded, Helix QAC can identify instances where the same diagnostic has been generated in a slightly different location. The suppression in the snapshot will still be applied within your own code.
New suppressions are typically created in Helix QAC Dashboard on a regular basis. To obtain the latest suppressions, simply download a more recent snapshot. However, if much of the code that you have locally is older than the latest check-in (which can happen if you need stability in the code on which you are not actually working), you should select a snapshot for which the source code is most similar to your own. This is because Helix QAC Dashboard only carries forward suppressions while the diagnostic is still present. A suppression needed for your older code may no longer be present in the latest "fixed" code.