Skip to content

Rename Refactoring

Spoofax provides an automated rename refactoring as an editor service for every language developed with it that has the static semantics defined with Statix or NaBL2.

Strategy

Rename refactoring is enabled by default for new Spoofax language projects. This works by registering the rename-action strategy from the statixruntime library as an action in a menu. This strategy takes three parameters: a layout-preserving pretty-printing strategy (construct-textual-change by default), the editor analyze strategy (editor-analyze by default), and a strategy that should succeed when renaming in multi-file mode.

The default rename refactoring strategy looks like this:

rules

  rename-menu-action = rename-action(construct-textual-change,
    editor-analyze, fail)

To enable multi-file mode, change the last argument to id:

rules

  rename-menu-action = rename-action(construct-textual-change,
    editor-analyze, id)

Statix

For the renaming to work correctly in all cases when using Statix, terms that represent a declaration of a program entity, such as a function or a variable, need to set the @decl property on the name of the entity. For example, when declaring a type:

declareType(scope, name, T) :-
  !type[name, T] in scope,
  @name.decl := name,
  query type filter P* I* and { name' :- name' == name } in scope |-> [_].

Known Issues

When a parse tree of a name is preceded by a term which is parsed from an empty string. The renaming algorithm will incorrectly select the preceding term to be renamed, and mostly fail accordingly. Sometimes, this issue can be circumvented by selecting the complete surrounding term. This issue is known to occur for:

  • Statix predicate names.

See Also


Last update: March 22, 2024
Created: March 22, 2024