RDC01001 — Use meaningful identifier names

Severity: Information · Family: RDC (Rubberduck Core analyzers) · Raised by: UseMeaningfulIdentifierNamesAnalyzer

A name does not say what it names.

A name is reported when it breaks one of the rules of Rubberduck's meaningful names inspection, the first it breaks being the one that is told:

Rule	Example
It has fewer than 3 characters.	`x`, `ws`
It ends with a digit: it says it is one of several, and not what makes it different from the others.	`total1`, `Sheet2`
It has no vowel, and is unlikely to be a word. A vowel is an `a`, `e`, `i`, `o` or `u`, accented or not.	`tmp`, `cnt`

The names it applies to are the ones the module chooses: variables, constants, parameters, procedures, properties, events, enumerations and their members, user-defined types and their fields. A procedure of an external library is named by the library, and a procedure that has an underscore in its name implements an interface member, handles an event or is a lifecycle handler (Class_Initialize): they are named by the interface, the event and the language, and are not reported. The accessors of a property are one name. The diagnostic is an opinion of the analyzer and not a condition of the language.

Approving a name

A name that breaks a rule and that is fine - the counter of a loop is i - is approved by listing it, in the Configuration:Diagnostics section of the extension's appsettings.json. A name is compared without regard to case, like every identifier of the language, and nothing is approved by default.

{
  "Configuration": {
    "Diagnostics": {
      "MeaningfulNames": {
        "AllowedNames": [ "i", "j", "k", "x", "y" ]
      }
    }
  }
}

The list is DiagnosticsOptions.MeaningfulNames. It is a suggestion because renaming does not change what the declaration is.

Fixing it

The diagnostic is fixed by renaming the declaration, which renames every name that refers to it (textDocument/rename). Its code action is a rename to a name the user chooses: only the user can say what the name means.

How it is raised

Situation	Example	Resolution
A name chosen by the module breaks a rule and is not approved.	`Dim tmp As Long`	Give it a name that says what it is: `Dim remainder As Long`; or approve it.

Table of Contents

RDC01001 — Use meaningful identifier names

Approving a name

Fixing it

How it is raised

See also