Merge multiple projects files into one fat .cc.json

[Richargh]

Feature request

Description

As an auditor, I want to merge multiple project files for separate services into one fat file with folders per project so that it's easier to load and share them.

Context

Let's say you have an audit where a team has divided their code up into 20 repositories. #3742 makes it already easier to merge these. But it is a bit tiresome to load them in codecharta and share the files. It would be much nicer if you could merge all 20 (or 50 or 100) of these files into one big file. Perhaps these files are organized like this:

├📁 merge
├─📄 prj1.merge.cc.json                
├─📄 ...
├─📄 prj20.merge.cc.json               

Internally the files are structure like

# prj1.merge.cc.json
root
- src/
- pom.xml

and

# prj2.merge.cc.json
root
- src/
- pom.xml

If I were to blindly merge files on the same level then files like pom.xml would override each other and src/ would end up in a very strange state.

It would be much nicer if the output of this merge could be:

# all.merge.cc.json
root
- prj1
- - src/
- - pom.xml
- prj2
- - src/
- - pom.xml

Acceptance criteria

• One new command-line argument exists to merge multiple files into one fat output file where each input file gets its own folder. For example:
  • ccsh merge merge1/ merge2/ --fat -o all.merge.cc.json

Assumptions & Exclusions

• The new command does no clever matching based on file names as suggested in Merge multiple project files into multiple project outputs (MIMO) #3742.

Development notes (optional Task Breakdown)

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Open questions

[phanlezz]

What would be the behavior like if there are two prj1 files present (multiple files with the same prefix)?
Maybe this is a sub-mode for --mimo ? I think it would not be too much work to remove the single file checks and modify the file output of MIMO to implement this feature. @Richargh

[Richargh]

@phanlezz you mean like the following?

├📁 merge
├─📄 prj1.git.cc.json
├─📄 prj1.sonar.cc.json                
├─📄 prj2.merge.cc.json
├─📄 ...
├─📄 prj20.merge.cc.json               

I'd say it would be nice if --fat complained and aborted then. Maybe the user forgot to merge the two prj1 files beforehand.

[Richargh]

For now at least, I would keep --mimo and --fat seperate. They fulfil different purposes during a health check and I hope the code is clearer when we keep them separate.