Contents > 8 Defining Custom Design Metrics and Rules > 8.3 Definition of Design Rules > 8.3.4 Valueset for Rules

8.3.4 Valueset for Rules

The valueset procedure for rules calculates a value set for a model element (see Section 8.2.1.4 "Attribute "valueset""), and reports any elements contained in there.

For example, assume we have a value set "AttrNameSet" defined for classes, which is a multiset of the names of the attributes of the class. We can then define a rule to check for duplicate names:

<rule name="DupAttrNames" domain="class" category="Correctness" 
   severity="1-high">
  <description>The class has two or more attributes with 
     identical names.</description>
  <valueset set="AttrNameSet" mincnt="2" />
</rule>
The procedure evaluates the set expression for the class, and reports all elements that occur at least twice. The value of the rule is the value of the reported element in the value set; in our example this is the duplicate attribute name. In addition to the set attribute, the valueset procedure accepts the attributes mincnt and precondition, which have the same meaning as they have for rule projections (see Section 8.3.3 "Projection for Rules").