Purpose of SourceFiles flag while generating Jacoco Reports using Jacoco CLI?

Question

What is the advantage of using --sourcefiles flag while generating jacoco reports using jacoco cli jar vs when not using it?

Reference: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/cli.html

Task: Report

Answer 1

To see the difference you can try with and without this option. For example:

Given following src/org/example/Example.java

package org.example;

class Example {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, World!");
    }
}

After compilation and execution by

javac src/org/example/Example.java -d classes
java -javaagent:jacoco-0.8.5/lib/jacocoagent.jar -cp classes org.example.Example

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Generation of report without --sourcefiles

java -jar jacoco-0.8.5/lib/jacococli.jar report jacoco.exec --classfiles classes --html report_without_sourcefiles

will produce report in directory report_without_sourcefiles where you can not see source file

---

While generation of report with --sourcefiles

java -jar jacoco-0.8.5/lib/jacococli.jar report jacoco.exec --classfiles classes --sourcefiles src --html report_with_sourcefiles

will produce report in directory report_with_sourcefiles where you can see source file