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Date Submitted

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0005997

ETSI TTCN-3 Quality Checker

T3Q tool

public

16-01-2012 16:31

Reporter

Philip Makedonski

Assigned To

Philip Makedonski

Priority

normal

Severity

feature

Reproducibility

N/A

Status

assigned

Resolution

open

Platform

OS Version

Product Version

Target Version

Fixed in Version

Summary

0005997: Regular expression management in configuration files

Description

The increasingly complex regular expressions used for naming conventions and other settings require adequate means to manage them, since trivial mistakes become difficult to notice, and complex sub-expressions that are often reused generally need to be kept in sync whenever changes to them are applied. This makes the current way of managing the regular expressions less and less practicable.

As a consequence, possible alternatives to manage this problem should be discussed briefly within this CR, resulting in the selection of a suitable solution and its implementation in a subsequent release of the T3Tools as this CR is resolved.

The proposed solutions, sorted in terms of estimated effort required for their realization, and also in expected convenience in use, from least to most, are:
* refer to available 3rd party online and/or offline editors in the documentation - it is up to the user to determine whether they need one, which one they prefer to use, and how they intend to use it
* bundle an external editor as is - provided its license is compatible and it can be easily bundled
* integrate external editor - provided its license is compatible and it can be easily integrated, it will serve sole purpose of regular expression editing and still require user to manage settings manually
* integrate external editor/develop internal editor into a complete settings editor - license and platform compatibility required, complete GUI for managing all settings, including regular expressions validation against (bookmarked) text samples
* suggested language / variable reference method - requires a precise specification of desired language or variable referencing method, may result in further complexity and will certainly break regular expression compatibility with other tools, should it be desirable to validate regular expressions with third party tools. It would benefit from appropriate GUI as well

Examples for possible third party regular expression editors include:
- http://myregexp.com/eclipsePlugin.html [^] - regex utility for Eclipse, very handy, should be easy to integrate
- http://myregexp.com/ [^] - corresponding online version of the regex utility
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/regexpeditor/ [^] - java-based regex editor with many advanced features
- http://weitz.de/regex-coach/ [^] - Windows-only regular expression editor with some advanced features
- http://www.solmetra.com/scripts/regex/ [^] - another online regular expression validator
- http://www.regextester.com/ [^] - yet another online regex validator
- http://www.fileformat.info/tool/regex.htm [^] - multi-input online regex validator
- http://regexpal.com/ [^] - yet another online regex validator
- ...

The different approaches have their pros and cons. Ultimately, an integrated solution for GUI-based settings management would provide most convenience, however it would also require disproportionate amount of effort, which may be difficult to justify at this stage, as settings are not expected to change often enough to make this approach sensible. The easiest/fastest solution remains referring to third party tools (which are often an integral part of developers' toolboxes anyway).

Issue History
Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
16-01-2012 16:31	Philip Makedonski	New Issue
16-01-2012 16:31	Philip Makedonski	Status	new => assigned
16-01-2012 16:31	Philip Makedonski	Assigned To	=> Philip Makedonski

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