Too-Many-Statements.md

Too Many Statements

Introduction

A method with Too Many Statements is any method that has a large number of lines.

Current Support in Reek

Too Many Statements warns about any method that has more than 5 statements. Reek's smell detector for Too Many Statements counts +1 for every simple statement in a method and +1 for every statement within a control structure (if, else, case, when, for, while, until, begin, rescue) but it doesn't count the control structure itself.

So the following method would score +6 in Reek's statement-counting algorithm:

def parse(arg, argv, &error)
  if !(val = arg) and (argv.empty? or /\A-/ =~ (val = argv[0]))
    return nil, block, nil                                         # +1
  end
  opt = (val = parse_arg(val, &error))[1]                          # +2
  val = conv_arg(*val)                                             # +3
  if opt and !arg
    argv.shift                                                     # +4
  else
    val[0] = nil                                                   # +5
  end
  val                                                              # +6
end

(You might argue that the two assigments within the first @if@ should count as statements, and that perhaps the nested assignment should count as +2.)

Configuration

Reek's Too Many Statements detector supports the Basic Smell Options, plus:

Option	Value	Effect
max_statements	integer	The maximum number of statements allowed in a method before a warning is issued. Defaults to 5.

Too Many Statements's default configuration is:

---
TooManyStatements:
  enabled: true
  exclude:
  - initialize
  max_statements: 5

By default, initialize is not checked for length; any class's constructor can be as long as necessary.