title: Merging multiple jacoco agent reports to be used by SONAR?
body: <p>I'm running custom parallel system tests across multiple vm's and performing runtime analysis on our compiled application using the jacoco agent. Each of these agents will generate their own report.exec, with corresponding coverage, and we want a way to represent overall "integration test" coverage for the project (in SONAR) as a whole.</p>
  
  <p>This endeavor is still in the planning phase, so I'm doing my best to create a road map. I understand that ant/maven builds make report merging easy, however it is a requirement that the jacoco <em>agent</em> be used to generate runtime coverage due to the nature of our test environment.</p>
  
  <p>I've searched high and low for a solution that applies to this situation but it seems like almost every problem that falls into this jacoco/sonar category has its own unique conditions, and almost nobody has any interest in using the jacoco agent.</p>
  
  <p>The agents will be running in tcpserver mode with a master client responsible for orchestrating dumps and report output. If this client is configured to output to a single file, will these reports automatically be appended/merged into one? Does there exist any API or stand-alone project for merging multiple coverage reports that I can integrate into our client that doesn't depend on ant or maven?</p>
  
  <p>Alternatively, is there a SONAR configuration for accepting multiple reports of this nature and merging their coverage by line-of-code? Define each individual report in the parent pom.xml or just give it a path to the folder containing the whole collection and let SONAR sort it out?</p>
  
  <p>I'm willing to accept that there's no easy solution to this problem, but anything short of having to write my own merge functionality would really help get this project off the ground.</p>
  
  <p>E: It's probably worth mentioning that we won't be generating any actual HTML/XML/etc. reports, just exec files which we'll feed to SONAR.</p>