Additional inspection result for '@Description("")

[ChrisBrackett]

What
RD tells me an annotation is present but an attribute is missing if I leave this in my code:
'@Description("")
I would like it to tell me the annotation is blank.

Why
I paste blank description and module description annotations and fill them in later. This would clearly show where I intend to have annotations but have not yet written them. Additionally, if RD ever includes a feature to auto-add blank description annotations to every procedure and module (to encourage documentation of code) this additional annotation would play nicely with that.

Example
This code should trigger the inspection:

'@Description("")
Public Sub DoSomething() ' double quotes in description annotation
End Sub

'@Description()
Public Sub DoSomethingElse() ' no double quotes in description annotation
End Sub

---

Resources
Each inspection needs a number of resource strings - please provide a suggestion here:

• InspectionNames: Blank Attribute
• InspectionInfo: A blank Rubberduck annotation is specified for a module or member.
• InspectionResults:

[retailcoder]

@Description() could conceivably trigger IllegalAnnotation, since the argument can be considered as required. Seems that would be a more general solution that involves simple tweaking of an existing inspection, rather than a brand new one that only looks at one specific annotation type. Thoughts?

[ChrisBrackett]

That would do. It technically is illegal since the annotation doesn't generate an attribute.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to revise the ToDO explorer.

Adding 'Description" to the todo explorer will pull up all lines containing the term 'Description'

e.g.
'@description()
'@description("")
'@Discription("Wibble wibble")

but also unfortunately

Err.Description

The todo explorer will not detect the terms
@description
Description()
Description("")

So it would seem to me there are possibly three useful enhancements that could be introduced to the todo explorer.

1. An option to restrict the ToDo explorer to comment lines only

2. Allow the todo explorer to detect items beginning with @ and containing other none alphanumeric characters e.g. '"()

3. An option to allow the ToDo explorer to ignore the @IgnoreModule annotation so it can detect the '@IgnoreModule' annotation.

Thinking further, if annotations are an important part of RubberDuck, perhaps it is time to introduce an AnnotationExplorer?

[retailcoder]

An option to restrict the ToDo explorer to comment lines only

@SteveLaycock This has been the case since day 1... I'm not able to get anything that isn't a comment into the todo explorer. If you have repro steps proving otherwise, please open a new issue for this.

There really isn't any restriction on what constitutes a todo marker, other than it has to match a simple regex (and be in a comment - commented-out code is a comment) - that's by design. I don't think we should restrict todo markers to not start with @ or otherwise require any special syntax for them.

That said annotations are comments, but comments aren't necessarily annotations - the parse tree listener responsible for collecting todo markers should probably ignore annotations, but we don't want that modification to not pick up this todo marker:

'@Description(""); TODO come up with a good description for this procedure

[daFreeMan]

#4617 is definitely related.

Description can be added to the ToDo Explorer's list of items to look for and it will list all ''@Description lines. Unfortunately, that extra ' comment marker in there means that the annotation parsing will, by design, ignore the '@Description annotation.

Either the To Do explorer needs to be expanded to pick up annotations (perhaps configurable and as requested in #4617), or there needs to be a new Annotation Explorer.

@retailcoder My mistake. I didn't check properly and made the assumption that the err.description was NOT in a commented out line.