Uncommunicative-Module-Name.md

Uncommunicative Module Name

Introduction

An Uncommunicative Module Name is a module name that doesn't communicate its intent well enough. This code smell is a case of Uncommunicative Name.

Current Support in Reek

Uncommunicative Module Name checks for:

• single-character names
• any name ending with a number

Configuration

Reek's Uncommunicative Module Name detector supports the Basic Smell Options, plus:

Option	Value	Effect
reject	array of strings	The set of names that Reek uses to check for bad names. Defaults to single-letter names and names ending with a number.
accept	array or strings	The set of names that Reek will accept (and not report) even if they match one of the reject expressions. Empty by default.

An example configuration could look like this:

---
UncommunicativeModuleName:
  accept:
    - lassy
    - Util
  reject:
    - Helper

Reek will convert whatever you give it as a string to the corresponding regex, so "Helper" from above will be converted to /Helper/ internally.

Applying a configuration to a source file like this:

class Classy1; end # Should not be reported
class Util; end # Should not be reported
class BaseHelper; end # Should be reported

Reek would report:

smelly.rb -- 1 warning:
  [3]:UncommunicativeModuleName: BaseHelper has the name 'BaseHelper'

Advanced configuration

Sometimes just strings are not enough for configuration. E.g. consider this code sample:

class Klassy
  # ...
end

class KlassyModule
  # ...
end

and now imagine that you want to reject the name "Klassy" but not "KlassyModule". This wouldn't be possible with just using strings. For this reason Reek has a special syntax that allows you to use regexes by using a forward slash at the beginning and the end of the string. Everything within the forward slashes will be loaded as a regex.

A possible configuration that allows "KlassyModule" but rejects "Klassy" could look like this:

---
UncommunicativeModuleName:
  reject:
    - "/^Klassy$/"

Reek 4

In Reek 4 you could also pass regexes to accept or reject, meaning this was perfectly valid as well:

UncommunicativeModuleName:
  accept:
    - !ruby/regexp /foobar/

Support for this has been scrapped with Reek 5 to make the Reek configuration more yaml standard compliant. You can still pass in regexes, you just have to wrap them into a string. Please see "Advanced configuration" above.