Show overview of rules in extension tab in Studio Pro

[bartzantingh]

Currently, to know what linting rules are being applied to an application, you need to open the Mendix app's folder structure and find the separate .rego files.

It would be nice to be able to see an overview of the rules that are active from the MxLint tab in Studio Pro, separate from the linting results, with their number and title, and being able to see some of their metadata, like its category, severity, description and remediation.

This would help to inform the developer take the linting rules into account during development.

Nice to have: being able to activate/deactivate rules from that overview

[xiwenc]

That sounds good Bart!

Would this be a good direction:

• add a new screen to view and manage rules
• manage rules actions: enable/disable individually or all
• adding or removing is for now out of scope

Uncertain for now:

• should we put this new screen in a separate panel or somehow make it reachable via the existing MxLint panel?
• what would be a good way to distribute rules to other developers/projects? This could be relevant for the rules management scope.

[bartzantingh]

Could go one of several ways, each one with pros and cons...

Adding a tab to the extension's HTML makes for quick access from the extension itself, but does add a bit of clutter to the already limited space of the page, especially on smaller screens.

It could also be a new dialog, accessible from the extension's menu. Pro is that it's a dialog, so there's a lot more room for a nice screen, but a major con would be that it's several mouse clicks away (e.g. Extensions > MxLint > Rules)

My preference would be to add it to the HTML, for quick access and, if added (yes, please! 😉), being able to quickly switch rules on and off.

what would be a good way to distribute rules to other developers/projects

Do you mean distribution from the Github project?

[xiwenc]

With rules distribution i mean:

Currently default ruleset is fetched from github if it doesn't exist already. How do you see your organization ensure that teams use or have access to the appropriate ruleset defined by your organization?

[bartzantingh]

Yeah, that's a tricky one. An approach could be to always have a standard ruleset, for example based on the Mendix Best Practices for Development, be included in the extension by default. If complete enough, that should really be enough for a lot of organizations. And if not, it should at least be a good starting point for extending it even further with organization-specific rules.

I think the main thing here is to explain how it works, and how people can customize it to their own needs. Which, next to a working extension, means invest in good documentation.

In the future, we could add additional features to the extension, like making downloading that standard ruleset be optional so organizations can start with an empty set and build up their own from scratch, or download a subset of the standard ruleset so they can customize their customizing starting point. We could for example also think about a feature to set the severity of specific rules different from what is in the standard set.

Ultimately though, in my view, making sure the ruleset you lint against is the responsibility of the organization itself. Every org has its own specific things they want to check, have different views on how severe a violation of a particular rule is, etc. Best practices could be a very good, and shared, starting point for (optional) customization.

[bartzantingh]

This could be a good source for (default/extended) rules as well. I'm using this as a source of inspiration now for extending the ruleset for ABN AMRO.