Can I use Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.BannedApiAnalyzers as a library to analyze source code in a folder?

[MartyIX]

I find BannedApiAnalyzers (doc) to be a robust analyzer for checking if source code contain forbidden API or not. I would like to use it as a library in the following way (pseudocode):

var results = BannedApiAnalyzer.Analyze(files, bannedSymbolsTxt);

My question is twofold:

1. Can I do it?
2. Should I actually do it or is it not a supported use case?

Thank you!

[333fred]

You cannot do this, it is not a supported use case. What you could do is use Roslyn itself to create a compilation for those files, add the banned api analyzer to that compilation, and then get all diagnostics.

[MartyIX]

The type itself is public: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-analyzers/blob/372f0d4dd91199e415482a1ee302ee27162b885b/src/Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.BannedApiAnalyzers/CSharp/CSharpSymbolIsBannedAnalyzer.cs#L13C25-L13C54 So I guess that it's not exported by its nuget package or something.

[333fred]

You'd have to actually show your project. At a guess, you're depending on the package as an analyzer, not as a reference; you'll likely need to do a bit of msbuild magic to get a proper reference.

[MartyIX]

I created a minimum repro project here https://github.com/MartyIX/BannedApiRepro. This line https://github.com/MartyIX/BannedApiRepro/blob/ee700c9624154a645af55dcccaf684bac792e7a4/Program.cs#L7 reports a build error because CSharpSymbolIsBannedAnalyzer¹ is not available

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn-analyzers/blob/main/src/Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.BannedApiAnalyzers/CSharp/CSharpSymbolIsBannedAnalyzer.cs ↩

[333fred]

Yes, that's what I expected. As I mentioned, you're depending on the analyzer as an analyzer, not a reference. You'll need to do some msbuild logic to change that.

[MartyIX]

Thank you. Any idea what to look for specifically?

I guess I can repost the question to the msbuild repo. They might know the answer.