# CTEST_COVERAGE_COMMAND

New in version 3.1.

Specify the CTest `CoverageCommand` setting in a `ctest(1)` dashboard client script.

## Cobertura

Using Cobertura as the coverage generation within your multi-module Java project can generate a series of XML files.

The Cobertura Coverage parser expects to read the coverage data from a single XML file which contains the coverage data for all modules. Cobertura has a program with the ability to merge given `cobertura.ser` files and then another program to generate a combined XML file from the previous merged file. For command line testing, this can be done by hand prior to CTest looking for the coverage files. For script builds, set the `CTEST_COVERAGE_COMMAND` variable to point to a file which will perform these same steps, such as a `.sh` or `.bat` file.

    set(CTEST_COVERAGE_COMMAND .../run-coverage-and-consolidate.sh)

where the `run-coverage-and-consolidate.sh` script is perhaps created by the `configure_file()` command and might contain the following code:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash
    CoberturaFiles="$(find "/path/to/source" -name "cobertura.ser")"
    SourceDirs="$(find "/path/to/source" -name "java" -type d)"
    cobertura-merge --datafile coberturamerge.ser $CoberturaFiles
    cobertura-report --datafile coberturamerge.ser --destination . \
                     --format xml $SourceDirs

The script uses `find` to capture the paths to all of the `cobertura.ser` files found below the project's source directory. It keeps the list of files and supplies it as an argument to the `cobertura-merge` program. The `--datafile` argument signifies where the result of the merge will be kept.

The combined `coberturamerge.ser` file is then used to generate the XML report using the `cobertura-report` program. The call to the cobertura-report program requires some named arguments.

`--datafila`

  path to the merged `.ser` file

`--destination`

  path to put the output files(s)

`--format`

  file format to write output in: xml or html

The rest of the supplied arguments consist of the full paths to the `/src/main/java` directories of each module within the source tree. These directories are needed and should not be forgotten.