Listeners are a way to get information about the cops and their rules in the framework. The ApiCopManager will take care of all the retrieval of the results and the registration of the cops. The registered listeners are used by the ApiCopManager.WriteResults method to write the output to. To add a listener and be able to see the output of the ApiCop feature, use the following code:

var apiCopListener = new ConsoleApiCopListener();
ApiCopManager.AddListener(apiCopListener);

After the listeners are added, one can call ApiCopManager.WriteResults:

ApiCopManager.WriteResults();

Customizing grouping

It is possible to group the listeners. To specify the grouping, use the following code:

var apiCopListener = new ConsoleApiCopListener();
apiCopListener.Grouping = ApiCopListenerGrouping.Rule;

The following grouping options are available:

Creating custom listeners

Catel provides several listeners out of the box. To create custom listeners, the only requirement is to implement the IApiCopListener. To make it easier to create custom listeners (such as an HTML listener), Catel provides the following base classes which can also be used as a base for custom listeners:

• ApiCopListenerBase
  Gives most flexibility, but is also more work to implement 
• TextApiCopListenerBase
  Is fully prepared for all text-based listeners (such as console, text file, etc), and only requires the implementation of the WriteLine method