Issue subsystem general description

The Simantics issue subsystem is defined in various plugins including

• Issue model
  • org.simantics.issues.ontology (SVN)
• Issue user interface model
  • org.simantics.issues.ui.ontology (SVN)
• Headless issue code
  • org.simantics.issues (SVN)
  • org.simantics.issues.common (SVN)
• Issue user interface code
  • org.simantics.issues.ui (SVN)

Basics

An issue describes a condition in a model. Issues are categorized by severity in the following way

• Fatal issues indicate situations which should not occur in normal operation
• Error issues indicate a severe issue which blocks calculation
• Warning issues point out a possible error
• Info issues are good to know information
• Note issues are markers for documentation purposes

Severity is modelled using ISSUE.HasSeverity and ISSUE.Severity

Issues are somewhat related to events. The main difference between issues and events is that while events happen at a particular time, issues are conditions with a lifecycle. The different issue states are

• Active (default), which means that the condition is true
• Resolved (ISSUE.Resolved tag), which means that the condition is no longer true

Further issues can be categorized as

• User issues (ISSUE.UserIssue tag), which indicates that the user has manually created the condition
• Hidden issues (ISSUE.Hidden tag), which can be used as a hint for user interfaces.

The following also applies for issues

• Issues are directly linked to a model with L0.ConsistsOf
• Issues are given unique and harmless names (e.g. UUIDs)

Issues are identified by the following data

• A type resource (L0.InstanceOf)
• A list of context resources (ISSUE.Issue.HasContexts), where the first resource is a main context

All issues declare the following properties needed to e.g. display the issue in the Issue View.

• Description (L0.HasDescription), which is a one-line text about the issue
• Resource (ISSUE.Issue.resource), which is a textual representation of the main context resource
• Path (ISSUE.Issue.path), which is a textual representation of the location of the main context resource
• Severity (ISSUE.Issue.severity), which is a textual representation of issue severity
• Creation time (ISSUE.HasCreationTime), which is a textual representation of time of creation of the issue

Typically these are computational properties and e.g. the Description value is asserted in the issue type and computed from context resources.

User issues

User issues are created by

• org.simantics.issues.common.IssueUtils.newUserIssue
• org.simantics.issues.common.IssueUtils.newUserIssueForModel

User issues are removed by

• org.simantics.db.layer0.util.RemoverUtil.remove

Browsing

For example the following requests are defined for browsing issues

• org.simantics.issues.common.AllIssues
• org.simantics.issues.common.AllActiveIssues
• org.simantics.issues.common.<severity>Issues
• org.simantics.issues.common.IssuesOfSeverity

Computational issues

The lifecycle of computational issues is determined by issue sources. Issue sources are divided into the following categories

• Batch issue sources, which can compute on demand a set of issues from given context
• Continuous issue sources, which can track the set of issues from given context

Code

The issue model can be manipulated using the following codes

• org.simantics.issues.common.Issue and especially org.simantics.issues.common.StandardIssue for manipulating, comparing and storing issues into database. StandardIssue assumes that all properties of an issue are determined by assertions in the issue type.

Some utility codes can be found in

• org.simantics.issues.common.IssueUtils

The main codes for continuous validation are

• org.simantics.issues.common.IssueUtils.listenActiveProjectIssueSources
• org.simantics.issues.common.DependencyIssueValidator2 for validating a context resource
• org.simantics.issues.common.DependencyIssueSynchronized2 for synchronizing the model