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Contents > 8 Defining Custom Design Metrics and Rules > 8.3 Definition of Design Rules > 8.3.2 Cycle

8.3.2 Cycle

The cycle procedure detects cycles in a directed graph. It does so by calculating the strongly connected components of the graph. Within a strongly connected component (SCC), there exists a path from each node to every other node of the SCC, hence a cycle. A graph is acyclic if and only if it has no SCCs.

You can use this procedure to check for cyclic dependencies between model elements. For example, the following rule checks for cycles in the inheritance graph for classes:

<rule name="CyclicInheritance" domain="class" category="Inheritance" 
      severity="1-high">
  <description>Class inherits from itself!</description>
  <cycle nodes="Parents" />
</rule>

The domain of the rule is "class", so the classes of the model constitute the nodes of the graph. The required set expression nodes yields, for each node, the set of connected nodes to which there is an edge. In our example, set "Parents" is the set of parents of the class.

To report the SCCs found, each model element in a SCC receives a label of the form "cyc# c (n nodes)", where c is the number of the SCC, and n is the number of nodes in the SCC.

The rule reports a violation for each model element in each SCC. The value of the rule shown to the user is the label of the model element. That way, users can tell which elements belong to which connected component.

In some cases, you may only want to report SCCs of a certain size, for instance, SCCs with three or more nodes. To this end, the cycle procedure has a second, optional attribute minnodes, which specifies the minimum number of nodes an SCC must have to be reported. The default is 1 (nodes having an edge back to themselves).

Section 8.3.1 "Violation"

Contents

Section 8.3.3 "Projection for Rules"