Comments on: Finding all Unused Public Methods in Java

By: Kris Kemper

Kris Kemper — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:35:37 +0000

Thanks Joerg Spieler! I’ll try it out. I’m glad to find out that a tool like exists.

By: Joerg Spieler

Joerg Spieler — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 12:57:08 +0000

Here is a Eclipse plugin to find unused public methods:
http://www.ucdetector.org/

By: Kris Kemper

Kris Kemper — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 14:27:41 +0000

Sorry man, I never got back to this again. I’m sure that if I ever have to do it again, I’ll attempt the Eclipse Shell approach.

By: XM

XM — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:09:04 +0000

Hey Kris, I’m facing a similar cleanup pain…
did you manage to create the script for finding unused methods?

By: Jim LoVerde

Jim LoVerde — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:05:11 +0000

Depending on the comprehensiveness of your unit/integration/functional tests, you could run your tests over your codebase using a coverage tool like Emma or Cobertura and then use the reports to indentify getters/setters that were never invoked.

It’s true that this might give some false positives if your tests aren’t complete. But that’s also true of a static code analyzer like Eclipse’s if you have anything in your application that might be calling those getters/setters via reflection.

By: Kris Kemper

Kris Kemper — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:00:19 +0000

Thanks dude, that looks like a good tool for what I want.

By: murphee

murphee — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:12:28 +0000

Script your task – either checkout EclipseMonkey, or use the interactive EclipseShell:
http://eclipse-shell.sourceforge.net/
(which gives you a choice of JRuby/Beanshell/Rhino).

Basically: I guess what you could do is use the functionality of “Find all References”, and simply do that for all methods (you just get the CompilationUnit for the class, and that allows you to get classes and their members).