Physical packages and package declaration in DROOLS - drools

What is the use of physical packages and package declaration in Drools.
For eg,
I have a rule, Myrule.drl in the physical package com.mycompany
As I understand the package declaration in drools doesn't depend on the actual physical package the file lies in.
So I can give in Myrule.drl as
package com.sample;
rule "my rule"
when
then
end
Can somebody help me to understand what is the relation between the physical package/folder that the drl file lies and the package declaration in drl file?

Your understanding is correct. There is no relation between the package declaration in your DRL and the place where the DRL file is.
All the Java classes generated by either the RHS of the rules or the type declarations are going to be placed by Drools' Compiler in the package defined in the DRL file where they are. This allow you to have rules or declare types with same name but in different packages.
Hope it helps,

Why don't you just read the documentation, Drools "Expert" manual, Section 7.5?
A package is a collection of rules and other related constructs, such as imports and globals. The package members are typically related to each other - perhaps HR rules, for instance. A package represents a namespace, which ideally is kept unique for a given grouping of rules. The package name itself is the namespace, and is not related to files or folders in any way.
There's more...

Can somebody help me to understand what is the relation between the physical package/folder that the drl file lies and the package declaration in drl file?
There is no relationship (directly). You have to think in terms of what happens when you run the rules engine. When you run your application, these rules are turned into virtual objects placed in the declared namespace. So, for example:
DRL snippet
package com.mystuff
import java.util.logging.Logger;
import java.util.logging.Level;
rule "Hello World"
when
some condition...
then
Logger.log(Level.INFO, "Hello World");
end
When this rule is activated, given that you have logging turned on to the right levels, you will notice an entry similar to this one:
INFO com.mystuff.Rule_HelloWorld592399015 defaultConsequence Hello World
proving that the rule was turned into a virtual object (you won't find it as a .class file in your project) that it's located in the com.mystuff namespace as Estaban Aliverti mentioned on this post.
This is not that important if you are only operating with a single rule file. But, as you can imagine, if you have multiple files with similar rules, they will be resolved by the namespace included in the DRL file.

Related

How to find unused imports in umbrella header architecture?

I am looking to find unused imports in an umbrella architecture. The imports are used within swift files. These files receive their imports from Objective-C headers so a text based search would not work. I wrote a script that searches for imports and checks if they are used within the class through text. But the issue is that some imports do not have to be explicitly stated. For example, if we have a framework foo that we use by:
import foo
and that framework has
#import <Example/Example.h>
in its own umbrella header foo.h. I have access to Example, without explicitly importing it.
So the issue is that we cannot see if an import is unused because it does not have to be explicitly imported. Is there a way we can detect unused imports?
I created a text based script in python that searches through a code base and checks for imports that are not used. It would go through directories and look for specific imports, and if they are present check if they are actually being used within the class. I expected that this would work without considering the umbrella architecture. But because there are scenarios where imports do not have to be explicitly stated, this did not work.

Why does Erlang offer both `import` for modules and `include` for headers?

Erlang's -import() directive lets you import code from other modules. Its include() directive lets you import code from headers. Why reasons are there to prefer either one over the other?
My hunch is that headers are good for short, easy-on-the-compiler kinds of code, such as record definitions, when you don't want to have to qualify the
Learn You Some Erlang states[1] that "Erlang header files are pretty similar to their C counter-part: they're nothing but a snippet of code that gets added to the module as if it were written there in the first place." Thus inclusion seems to cause the compiler to duplicate effort across different modules. And header files are what appear to be an optional complication on top of the mandatory module system. So why would I ever use a header file?
[1] https://learnyousomeerlang.com/a-short-visit-to-common-data-structures
Erlang's -import just allows you to call imported functions without the Module. It hurts legibility and should not be used: You need to check the import directive to know whether a function is local or external to the module.
With header files you get the same functionality as in C, you can use them to share -record definitions instead of having a dto-like module (1), you can use them to include -defines to use the same macros (2).
1:
-record(position, {x, y}).
Imagine that you have #position{} throughout the code, instead of defining the record everywhere and updating all of the copies when the record definition changes, you use a header (or a dto module with opaque types, but that's for another question).
And let's just hope that you remember to update all the copies, otherwise chaos ensues.
2:
-define(ENUM01, enum01).
-define(DEFAULT_TIMEOUT, 1000).
Instead of using enum01 and 1000 everywhere, which is error prone and requires multiple updates if you need to change them, you define them in a header and use them as ?ENUM01 and ?DEFAULT_TIMEOUT
Or you can be more thorough when testing:
-ifdef(TEST).
-define(assert(A), true = A).
-else
-define(assert(A), A).
-endif.
Or you can include some useful information:
-define(LOG(Level, X), logger:log(Level, X, #{line => ?LINE}).
The Erlang standard library uses header files to provide the ability to add metadata to your code.
For instance, EUnit functionality:
-include_lib("eunit/include/eunit.hrl").
import is helpful in building encapsulations, whereas include is kind of pre-processing(which means code will be part of the unit before it gets through the compiler).
An import ensues a dependency between two modules, which means a module A importing module B has B as dependency ... Whereas an include is extensional which means a module has included some code and that code is part of the module itself, and that is what header files do.
module(s) and header(s) are 2 semantically different things and serve different purposes. With modules, we can build abstractions by using the export(s), keep things confined by not exporting them, import from other modules(but they are not exported by default), re-export imported things etc etc. So when we import stuff, we can call upon functions from the other module, but only those which are exported in the other module. However that is not the case with header files. Everything inside a header file becomes part of the module which includes them. There is no sense of export/import inside header files. And header files are quite useful for writing and distributing definition(s) which otherwise could lead to redundancy in case of large programs.
So essentially they are 2 different things, so 2 different keywords available at our disposal. So don't prefer one over the other. Learn both of them as we need both of them.

Flutter imports: relative path or package?

In Flutter, for importing libraries within our own package's lib directory, should we use relative imports
import 'foo.dart'
or package import?
import 'package:my_app/lib/src/foo.dart'
Dart guidelines advocate to use relative imports :
PREFER relative paths when importing libraries within your own package’s lib directory.
whereas Provider package says to always use packages imports :
Always use package imports. Ex: import 'package:my_app/my_code.dart';
Is there a difference other than conciseness? Why would packages imports would reduce errors over relative imports?
From the same Dart guidelines, further down they give this reason for the relative imports:
There is no profound reason to prefer the former—it’s just shorter, and we want to be consistent.
Personally, I prefer the absolute method, despite it being more verbose, as it means when I'm importing from different dart files (in other folders), I don't have to work out where the file to be imported is, relative to the current file. Made-up example:
I have two dart files, at different folder levels, that need to import themes/style.dart:
One is widgets/animation/box_anim.dart, where the relative path import would be:
import '../../themes/style.dart';
The other is screens/home_screen.dart with the relative import:
import '../themes/style.dart';
This can get confusing, so I find it better to just use the absolute in both files, keeping it consistent:
import 'package:myapp/themes/style.dart';
And just stick that rule throughout. So, basically, whatever method you use - Consistency is key!
The Linter for Dart package, also has something to say about this, but is more about the Don'ts of mixing in the '/lib' folder:
DO avoid relative imports for files in lib/.
When mixing relative and absolute imports it's possible to create
confusion where the same member gets imported in two different ways.
An easy way to avoid that is to ensure you have no relative imports
that include lib/ in their paths.
TLDR; Choose the one you prefer, note that prefer_relative_imports is recommended in official Effective Dart guide
First of all, as mentioned in this answer, Provider do not recommands package imports anymore.
Dart linter provides a list of rules, including some predefined rulesets :
pedantic for rules enforced internally at Google
lints or even flutter_lints (previously effective_dart) for rules corresponding to the Effective Dart style guide
flutter for rules used in flutter analyze
Imports rules
There is actually more than two opposites rules concerning imports :
avoid_relative_lib_imports, enabled in pedantic and lints rulesets, basically recommend to avoid imports that have 'lib' in their paths.
The two following are the one you mention :
prefer_relative_imports, enabled in no predefined rulesets, but recommended in Effective Dart guide in opposition to :
always_use_package_imports, enabled in no predefined rulesets. Which means that it is up to you and to your preferences to enable it (be careful, it is incompatible with the previous rule)
Which one should I choose?
Choose the rule you want ! It will not cause any performance issue, and no rule would reduce errors over the other. Just pick one and make your imports consistent across all your project, thanks to Dart linter.
I personnaly prefer using prefer_relative_imports, as it is recommended by Dart team, with this VSCode extension which automatically fix and sort my imports.
Provider do not need packages imports anymore.
This was a workaround to an old Dart bug: Flutter: Retrieving top-level state from child returns null
TL;DR, by mixing relative and absolute imports, sometimes Dart created a duplicate of the class definition.
This led to the absurd line that is:
import 'package:myApp/test.dart' as absolute;
import './test.dart' as relative;
void main() {
print(relative.Test().runtimeType == absolute.Test().runtimeType); // false
}
Since provider relies on runtimeType to resolve objects, then this bug made provider unable to obtain an object in some situations.
My 5 cents on the topic are that absolute (package:my_app/etc/etc2...) imports cause much less trouble than relative ones (../../etc/etc2...) when you decide to reorganize/cleanup your project`s structure because whenever you move a file from one directory to another you change the "starting point" of every relative import that this file uses thus breaking all the relative imports inside the moved file...
I'd personally always prefer absolute to relative paths for this reason
This question already has good answers, but I wanted to mention an insanely annoying and hard-to-find problem I experienced with unit testing that was caused by a relative import.
The expect fail indicator for an exception-catching expect block
expect(
() => myFunction,
throwsA(isA<InvalidUserDataException>())
);
was showing the actual result as exactly the same as the expected result, and zero indication of why it's failing.
After massive trial-and-error, the issue was because the expected InvalidUserDataException (a custom-made class) was being imported to the test file in RELATIVE format vs PACKAGE format.
To find this, I had to compare side-by-side, line-by-line, call-by-call between this test file and another test file that uses the exact same exception expecters (It's lucky, we had this), and just by chance, I happened to scroll to the top of this file's imports and see the blue underline saying prefer relative imports to /lib directory.
No, they're not preferred; they're necessary, because the moment I changed that to a PACKAGE (absolute) import, everything suddenly started working.
What I learned from this is: Use absolute imports for test files (files outside the lib directory)
e.g. inside of src/test/main_test.dart
DON'T: use import '../lib/main.dart'
DO: use package:my_flutter_app/main.dart
Maybe other people knew this already, but I didn't, and I couldn't find anything online with searches about this issue, so I thought I would share my experience that might help others who got stuck around this.
Does anyone know why this happens?
Edit: For context, this happened while using Flutter 2.1.4 (stable) with Sound Null Safety
Do you use Integration Tests?
If the answer is yes, then in most cases you need to use package imports. When you attempt to run your integration tests on a physical device, any relative imports will not be able to find what they're looking for.
Example: https://github.com/fluttercommunity/get_it/issues/76
You can enforce package imports in your project by using these two linting rules:
always_use_package_imports
avoid_relative_lib_imports
I also prefer package imports because they stick even when rearranging your files and folders. Relative imports frequently break and it's a pain to have to remove them and reimport the offending dependency.
One very simple reason to not use package imports: rename your package without editing every dart file
Renaming can happen a few times while the product does not have a definitive name, and you or your product owner decides to change it.
It is much more painful to rename with package imports as your package name is in every import.
Of course you can change it with a find/replace query, but it's a useless edit on every dart file you can avoid with relative imports.
Plus, vscode allows to automatically update relative imports on file move/rename and I have never had any issue with this feature.

SystemVerilog: Using packages with classes and virtual interfaces

I'm a relative newbie to SystemVerilog.
I have a package with class A defined in it. This class uses a virtual interface, since
it's a driver (BFM) in a testbench. I'm using a package so I can use the same BFM in
other designs.
In my testbench, I import the A class and pass to it an instance of the virtual interface.
However, when a task in the class tries to assign a value to a signal in the interface, I'm getting a compilation error.
What am I doing wrong?
How can one package a BFM with a virtual interface?
Thanks,
Ran
SystemVerilog packages cannot include interfaces within the actual package. So your interface needs to be compiled along with you package source. The classes you define will reside in the package while the interface definition resides in the global scope where modules live.
Classes within packages can make references to virtual interfaces, but you need to make sure the interface is compiled and visible, apart from the package source.
Strictly according to the spec, I don't think this is possible since it adds an implicit external dependency:
Items within packages are generally type definitions, tasks, and
functions. Items within packages shall not have hierarchical
references to identifiers except those created within the package or
made visible by import of another package. A package shall not refer
to items defined in the compilation unit scope.
It doesn't say anything about the design element namespace, which is where interface declarations live, but accessing any member of an interface requires a hierarchical reference.
You should consider packages to be completely self-contained, other than pre-processor directives and import.
Generally the class declaration not present before its usage is resolved with the help of systemverilog typedef definition. For example "Class A uses Class B" and "Class B uses class A" then typedef is used to resolve the stalemate.
Now when you bring in the package with the above scenario then one needs to ensure both Class A and Class B have to be in same package. If they are not then the compile wont go through.
The reason being the SystemVerilog parser will need the definition of the classes indicated with the typedef at the end of the package parsing. This fails.
This issue needs to watched out that "typedef does not apply across package".

Strange behaviour when importing types in Scala 2.10

Today I cleared my .ivy cache and cleaned my project output targets. Since then I have been getting really strange behaviour when running tests with SBT or editing in the Scala IDE.
Given the following:
package com.abc.rest
import com.abc.utility.IdTLabel
I will get the following error:
object utility is not a member of package com.abc.rest.com.abc
Notice that com.abc is repeated twice, so it appears that the compiler uses the context of the current package when doing the import (maybe it's supposed to do this, but I never noticed it before).
Also, if I try to access classes in package com.abc from anywhere inside com.abc.rest (even using the full path) the compiler will complain that the type can not be found.
It appears that the errors only occur when I try to include files from parent packages. What I do find strange is that my code used to work. It only started happening after I cleaned up my project and my ivy cache, so maybe a later version of the compiler is more strict than the previous one.
I would love some ideas on what I can be doing wrong, or how I can go about troubleshooting this.
Update:
By first importing the parent classes and then defining the current package, the problem goes away:
import com.abc.utility.IdTLabel
import com.abs._
package com.abc.rest {
// Define classes belonging to com.abc.rest here
}
So this works, but I would still love to know why on earth the other way around worked, and then stopped working, and how on earth I can fix it. I had a good look, and could find no packages, objects or traits by the name of com anywhere inside the parent package.
Update relating to Worksheets:
Scala worksheets belonging to the same package share the same scope, which sounds obvious, but wasn't. Worksheets are not sand-boxed - they can see the project, and the project can see them. So all the 'test' object, traits, and classes you create inside the worksheet files, also becomes visible in the rest of the project.
I have so many worksheets that I did not even try to see where the problem came in. I simply moved them all to their own package, and like magic, the problem went away.
So, lesson learned for the day: If you create stuff inside worksheets, it's visible from outside the worksheet.
Anyway, this new found knowledge will come in handy, meaning anything 'interesting' can be build, monitored and tweaked inside the worksheet, while the rest of the project can actually use it. Quite cool actually.
It's still interesting to think how a sbt clean and cleaned up ivy cache managed to highlight the problem that was hidden before, but hey, that's another story....
(At the request of JacobusR, I'm making a proper answer out of my earlier comments).
This can happen if you have defined some class/trait/object inside package com.abc.rest.com. As soon as package com.abc.rest.com exists, and given that you are in package com.abc.rest, com would designate com.abc.rest.com as opposed to _root_.com. Fastest (but non-conclusive) way to check, without even scanning the source files, is to look for any .class files in the "com/abc/rest/com" sub-folder.
In particular you would get this behaviour if any of your files has duplicate package definitions (as in package com.abc.rest; package com.abc.rest; ...). If you have this duplicate package clause somewhere in the same file where you get the error, you wouldn't even see anything fishy with the .class files, as the failure at compiling the file would prevent the generation of .class files for any class definition inside the file.
The final bit of useful information is that as you found out the scala Worksheets are not sandboxed, and what you define in the worksheets affects your project's code (rather than only having the project's code affecting the worksheet). So a duplicate package clause in a worksheet could very well cause the error you got.
If package names conflict, there might be a custom error message for that. See if specifying the full path resolves the issue by starting from __root__. Ex. import __root__.com.foo.bar._