Changes in Mutings

by Jaime Iniesta
Mixing console with Mute leds

Photo by Joshua Eckstein on Unsplash

Muting Rules is one of the most used features in Rocket Validator Pro, as it lets you define simple rules to automatically ignore issues found by the checkers. You may want to ignore some issues found for many reasons, for example:

  • The affected code is out of your scope, for example if it’s being generated by a 3rd party software that you cannot control

  • You may be aware of an issue, but you’ve evaluated it and prefer to let it exist for some reason.

  • You’ve decided that this will be fixed later and prefer to concentrate on other issues first.

In those situations, Pro users can avoid all the noise related to those selected issues by muting them.

We’ve reviewed how this feature is being used, and how it could be improved so that it’s easier to handle. We’ve also vastly improved its performance so that mutings are applied much faster.

  • The Show / Hide Muted Issues toggle button is now gone. This button allowed viewers of the report to toggle the visibility of the muted issues, but it was often misunderstood based on our user surveys. Instead, it’s better to let the reports always show all the issues they contain.

  • New Muting Rules don’t modify older reports. Until now, when you defined a new Muting Rule, it was globally applied to all your reports, past, present, and future. This was a long process, but also confusing to some users. From now on, when a new Muting Rule is created, it will only affect the single report it’s created from, and the next reports run after that time. This is preferable as you can now easily compare a previous report, with the freshest report with the muting rules applied. This is also reflected in the Domain Stats generated.

  • Reports only store unmuted issues. Muting an issue on a report deletes the matching issues, and avoids these issues from appearing on the next reports as long as the Muting Rule exists.

  • Deleting a Muting Rule won’t modify previous reports. Until now, when you deleted a Muting Rule, the affected issues would be unmuted and come back to life in all reports. From now on, reports are not modified globally when you delete a Muting Rule. Issues found by the validators in the next checks will be stored in the reports if no Muting Rule matches them.

In short, the new Muting Rules engine runs faster and is easier to understand!

Let us know how we can make this even better for your validation workflows!

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