How can I find (and eliminate) all unreferenced fields declared in an interface?

Question

After eliminating some specific nonsense pattern, I need to identify and possibly delete fields that are declared in some interface like this:

public interface X
{
    String A = "xxx";
    String B = "zzz";
}

Sure I can use Eclipse's "find all references" for one identifier after another, but facing thousands of them lets that appear like a very dull fulltime job for days to come.

I tried both Google CodePro and the warnings that the Java compiler can spit out on demand, but found only options for non-public fields in classes, not for public fields in interfaces.

My next try would be: Comment them all out, and go through the errorlist. All fields that are not in the error list can be safely (in my case!) removed. That will be a dull day, too, because instead of a list of all fields that do have active references I am looking for a list of all fields that are not referenced anywhere.

So how can I find all those now-unreferenced fields efficiently?

I mean: I see it is dangerous to look at those references for a given project because another project that my Eclipse workspace does not know about might have references. That might be the rationale behind not offering the warning/analysis option I look for in Eclipse or CodePro.

This is not the case here, though. If it's not references in my project, I want to eliminate it.

You mean non-public fields? Yeah, good point. Maybe I should delete that aspect from the question. — TheBlastOne, Mar 22 '12 at 12:26
Yes, any field defined in an interface is implicitly `public static final` and can't be defined otherwise. Thus there are no non-static, non-public or non-final fields. — Thomas, Mar 22 '12 at 12:33
What does it mean if my question received "close" votes -- that it is bogus? — TheBlastOne, Mar 22 '12 at 12:34
@kleopatra thanks for repeating what I already suggested in my question :( — TheBlastOne, Mar 22 '12 at 17:05

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 22 '12 at 12:27

9

I think UCDetector is what you want : http://www.ucdetector.org/

answered Mar 22 '12 at 12:27

Guillaume USE

436
1
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Works. Installation was a bit glitchy, though, but it does its job. Thanks. – TheBlastOne Mar 22 '12 at 12:42

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 22 '12 at 13:06

0

If IntelliJ IDEA is option for you, even free community edition will highlight unused interface methods on the spot

answered Mar 22 '12 at 13:06

Konstantin Pribluda

12,329
1
30
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Thanks. I will stick to Eclipse, though. – TheBlastOne Mar 22 '12 at 13:10

How can I find (and eliminate) all unreferenced fields declared in an interface?

2 Answers2