What is Advanced module tab in Eclipse checkstyle plugin used for? - eclipse-plugin

Question

I am studying about checkstyle and eclipsecs plugin. When I create new "check" (by open new module), i noticed that they have Advanced tab with some strange features inside: id, comments, tokens (except custom check messages - it is obvious). You can see in my screenshot.
I did read their documents but haven't seen any explanation about these options.
Could you please explain it for me? Thank you very much.

Answer 1

These are possible properties in the checkstyle.xml which the Eclipse-CS visual editor is creating.
A check may be assigned an ID, which can later be used to refer to it, e.g. when suppressing it under certain circumstances. This is useful if you use the same type of check multiple times with different properties. This answer gives an example which makes use of this feature.
The comment is Eclipse-CS specific metadata. It is really just a comment text which is saved as check metadata (metadata element). But it is interpreted by the Eclipse checkstyle plugin only, which shows it again on the advanced tab.
The translate tokens checkbox adds a natural language (and possibly even localized) description to the list of tokens, if such list is present in the selected check. In your example, it is not, so the checkbox has no effect on this check (but it does on others, as that one is a global checkbox!).
Following are some screenshots with an example of the WhitespaceAround check, which supports lots of tokens.
Tokens list "raw" (no translation or sorting):
Tokens list "translated":
Tokens list "translated" and "sorted":
The sorting also affects the order in which tokens are written to the generated configuration file. The sorting seems to have to do with the numerical values of these tokens. Since they are internal and not visible to us users, it seems to have little use. Example:
Not "sorted":
<module name="WhitespaceAround">
<property name="tokens" value="ASSIGN,BAND,BAND_ASSIGN,BOR,BOR_ASSIGN,BSR,BSR_ASSIGN,BXOR,
BXOR_ASSIGN,COLON,DIV,DIV_ASSIGN,DO_WHILE,EQUAL,GE,GT,LAND,LCURLY,LE,LITERAL_ASSERT,
LITERAL_CATCH,LITERAL_DO,LITERAL_ELSE,LITERAL_FINALLY,LITERAL_FOR,LITERAL_IF,
LITERAL_RETURN,LITERAL_SYNCHRONIZED,LITERAL_TRY,LITERAL_WHILE,LOR,LT,MINUS,MINUS_ASSIGN,
MOD,MOD_ASSIGN,NOT_EQUAL,PLUS,PLUS_ASSIGN,QUESTION,RCURLY,SL,SLIST,SL_ASSIGN,SR,
SR_ASSIGN,STAR,STAR_ASSIGN,TYPE_EXTENSION_AND,WILDCARD_TYPE,GENERIC_START,GENERIC_END"/>
</module>
"Sorted":
<module name="WhitespaceAround">
<property name="tokens" value="COLON,NOT_EQUAL,QUESTION,DIV,DIV_ASSIGN,BXOR,BXOR_ASSIGN,
MINUS,LCURLY,RCURLY,STAR,STAR_ASSIGN,TYPE_EXTENSION_AND,BAND,LAND,BAND_ASSIGN,MOD,
MOD_ASSIGN,PLUS,PLUS_ASSIGN,LT,GENERIC_START,SL,SL_ASSIGN,LE,ASSIGN,MINUS_ASSIGN,
EQUAL,GENERIC_END,GT,GE,SR,SR_ASSIGN,BSR,BSR_ASSIGN,BOR,BOR_ASSIGN,LOR,LITERAL_ASSERT,
LITERAL_CATCH,LITERAL_DO,LITERAL_ELSE,LITERAL_FINALLY,LITERAL_FOR,LITERAL_IF,DO_WHILE,
LITERAL_RETURN,SLIST,LITERAL_SYNCHRONIZED,LITERAL_TRY,WILDCARD_TYPE,LITERAL_WHILE"/>
</module>
The examples were created with Eclipse-CS 6.14.0.