Identifiers should be spelled correctly

TypeName

IdentifiersShouldBeSpelledCorrectly

CheckId

CA1704

Category

Microsoft.Naming

Breaking Change

Breaking

Cause

The name of an externally visible identifier contains one or more words that are not recognized by the Microsoft spelling checker library. This rule does not check constructors or special-named members such as get and set property accessors.

Rule Description

This rule parses the identifier into tokens and checks the spelling of each token. The parsing algorithm performs the following transformations:

  • Capital letters start a new token. For example, MyNameIsJoe tokenizes to "My", "Name", "Is", "Joe".

  • For multiple capital letters, the last capital letter starts a new token. For example, GUIEditor tokenizes to "GUI", "Editor".

  • Leading and trailing apostrophes are removed. For example, 'sender' tokenizes to "sender".

  • Underscores signify the end of a token and are removed. For example, Hello_world tokenizes to "Hello", "world".

  • Embedded ampersands are removed. For example, for&mat tokenizes to "format".

The English (en) version of the spelling checker is used by default. No other language dictionaries are currently available.

How to Fix Violations

To fix a violation of this rule, correct the spelling of the word or add the word to a custom dictionary named CustomDictionary.xml. Place the dictionary in the installation directory of the tool, the project directory, or in the directory associated with the tool under the user's profile (%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\...).

  • Add words that should not cause a violation under the Dictionary/Words/Recognized path.

  • Add words that should cause a violation under the Dictionary/Words/Unrecognized path.

  • Add words that should be flagged as obsolete under the Dictionary/Words/Deprecated path. See the related rule topic "Use preferred terms" for more information.

  • Add exceptions to the acronym casing rules to the Dictionary/Acronyms/CasingExceptions path.

The following is an example of the structure of a custom dictionary file.

   <Dictionary>
      <Words>
         <Unrecognized>
            <Word>cb</Word>
         </Unrecognized>
         <Recognized>
            <Word>stylesheet</Word>
            <Word>GotDotNet</Word>
         </Recognized>
         <Deprecated>
            <Term PreferredAlternate="EnterpriseServices">ComPlus</Term>
         </Deprecated>
      </Words>
      <Acronyms>
         <CasingExceptions>
            <Acronym>CJK</Acronym>
            <Acronym>Pi</Acronym>
         </CasingExceptions>
      </Acronyms>
   </Dictionary>

When to Suppress Warnings

Suppress a warning from this rule only if the word is intentionally misspelled and the word applies to a limited set of the library. Correctly spelled words reduce the learning curve required for new software libraries.

Resource strings should be spelled correctly

Identifiers should be cased correctly

Identifiers should differ by more than case

Identifiers should not contain underscores

Use preferred terms

See Also

Concepts

How to: Customize the Code Analysis Dictionary