Does making resources.rules an array present a problem?

["Larry Golding (Myriad Consulting Inc)" <v-lgold@microsoft.com>]

TL;DR: After consideration, I don’t think there is actually a problem here. But please follow my argument to see if you agree.

 

Consider a SARIF consumer that has in hand a result object that specifies ruleId. If the consumer needs any rule metadata other than its id – for example, if it needs to display the message – then it needs result.ruleIndex to locate the associated rule object. If resources.rules does not appear in the log file, the consumer must probe for an external localized resource file, which might, for example, reside on a web site.

 

This means that the external localized resource file can never alter the order of the rule objects it contains. Newer versions of the file can’t reorder elements in the array or remove elements from the array. This wasn’t a problem when resources.rules was a dictionary.

 

Note that this is not a problem if the rules reside in a “external property file”, because such files are logically part of the root file. It’s only a problem if the consumer has to probe for an external localized resource file. It is also not a problem for run.files or run.logicalLocations.

 

On further consideration, I don’t think this is a real problem because external localized resource files are always associated with a particular version of the tool, so you’ll have something like this:

 

"tool": {

  "name": "CodeScanner",

  "version": "2.1.1",

  "language": "en-US",

  "resourceLocation": "https://www.contoso.com/CodeScanner/resources/2.1.1/",

  ...

}

 

So the SARIF consumer will always find the same version of the external localized resource file, and ruleIndex will always be good.

 

Do you agree?

 

Thanks,

Larry