## Why is this an issue?

Hard-coding a URI makes it difficult to test a program for a variety of reasons:

- path literals are not always portable across operating systems
- a given absolute path may not exist in a specific test environment
- a specified Internet URL may not be available when executing the tests
- production environment filesystems usually differ from the development environment

In addition, hard-coded URIs can contain sensitive information, like IP addresses, and they should not be stored in the code.

For all those reasons, a URI should never be hard coded. Instead, it should be replaced by a customizable parameter.

Further, even if the elements of a URI are obtained dynamically, portability can still be limited if the path delimiters are hard-coded.

This rule raises an issue when URIs or path delimiters are hard-coded.

### Exceptions

This rule does not raise an issue when:

- A constant path is relative and contains at most two parts.
- A constant path is used in an annotation
- A path is annotated

## How to fix it

### Code examples

#### Noncompliant code example

    public class Foo {
      public static final String FRIENDS_ENDPOINT = "/user/friends"; // Compliant path is relative and has only two parts

      public Collection<User> listUsers() {
        File userList = new File("/home/mylogin/Dev/users.txt"); // Noncompliant
        Collection<User> users = parse(userList);
        return users;
      }
    }

#### Compliant solution

    public class Foo {
      // Configuration is a class that returns customizable properties: it can be mocked to be injected during tests.
      private Configuration config;
      public Foo(Configuration myConfig) {
        this.config = myConfig;
      }
      public Collection<User> listUsers() {
        // Find here the way to get the correct folder, in this case using the Configuration object
        String listingFolder = config.getProperty("myApplication.listingFolder");
        // and use this parameter instead of the hard coded path
        File userList = new File(listingFolder, "users.txt"); // Compliant
        Collection<User> users = parse(userList);
        return users;
      }
    }

Exceptions examples:

    public class Foo {
      public static final String FRIENDS_ENDPOINT = "/user/friends"; // Compliant path is relative and has only two parts

      public static final String ACCOUNT = "/account/group/list.html"; // Compliant path is used in an annotation

      @Value("${base.url}" + ACCOUNT)
      private String groupUrl;

      @MyAnnotation()
      String path = "/default/url/for/site"; // Compliant path is annotated

    }