You can use code scanning and analysis tools to examine source code. These tools report issues for you to fix. Qt Creator enables you to load lists of issues into the Issues pane for easier navigation.

Qt Creator expects tasks to be defined in a simple line-based file format that is easy to generate using scripts. The scripts can either convert reports from other tools or create lists of issues in the task list format from code. For an example of a script that checks new lines of code and matches them against regular expressions to generate a task list, see scripts\mytasks.pl in the Qt Creator repository.

Managing Task List Entries

To open task list files in the Issues pane, choose File > Open. Right-click a task list entry to open a context menu that contains commands for managing the entry. You can copy or remove task list entries or navigate to the corresponding source code.

Qt Creator monitors the loaded files and displays the changes in the Issues pane. To keep the current entries in a task list, but stop checking for changes, select Stop Monitoring.

Task List File Format

The filename extension must be .tasks for Qt Creator to recognize a file as a task list file.

Each line in a task list file is treated as a tab-separated list of strings with \t, \n, and \\ used as escape characters. The strings are used to create one task per line. The lines can have one of the following formats:

• description
• type\tdescription
• file\ttype\tdescription
• file\tline\ttype\tdescription

The task type can have one of the following values:

• A string starting with err, which displays the error icon in the beginning of the line
• A string starting with warn, which displays the warning icon
• Any other value, which sets the task type to Unknown and does not display an icon

The values are not case sensitive.

Lines starting with the hash mark character (#) in the first column are ignored.