About comments

Corticon lets you associate comments with most items in your rule assets. These comments provide helpful information about the assets to current and future stakeholders – a best practice.

Levels of Comments

You can add two levels of comments, asset-level and item-level. Asset-level comments are associated with an asset itself, while Item-level comments are more granular and associated with items such as Vocabulary entities, domains, attributes, and associations.

Multiple Comments

You can add more than one comment to an asset or individual item within an asset. Using multiple comments allows you to create a history or audit trail for the asset or item.

Types of Comments

Each comment is an action To Do, a Change Log, an informative Note (the default type of comment), or a comment that Needs Review.

Rule asset specifics

Each type of rule asset has specific commenting behavior, as follows:

Asset	Notes
Vocabularies	Comments are added in the Vocabulary editor, not from the Project Explorer or Rule Vocabulary views. Comments can be added at the root level for the file, but not for Custom Data Types or Datasource definitions.
Rulesheets	Select a range of items (such as a1:c2) to add and associate comments to them. If you later inject a new column within that range, the existing comments for that range are now associated to items in the added column too. And the Comments View is auto-updated to reflect the extended range (e.g., a1:c3). When a column or row is removed from the Rulesheet, comments associated with its items are removed. When a column or row is inserted into the Rulesheet, all comments are re-numbered accordingly. When you expand columns, existing comments are associated with the expanded columns. However, you cannot add comments to an expanded column directly. When you collapse or compress a column, associated comments are removed. Therefore, comments of compressed columns are removed. You cannot add comments to Rule Statements.
Ruleflows	To add a comment to a Ruleflow, select the item to comment, and then choose the menu command Ruleflow > Add Comments. You can add comments to most objects on the canvas: Rulesheet, Ruleflow, Service Call-out, Branch, and Subflow. When an item is a node is selected, the comment is added to it as an item-level comment. When no object is selected, the comment is added as a file-level comment. You can add several comments for an item or file. When multiple objects are selected on the canvas, no comments are allowed. Unlike other assets, the Ruleflow toolbar provides no Comments button.
Ruletests	You can add comments in the Input column to all entities, attributes, and associations. Only one comment is allowed for each item. Only one item can be selected to apply comment. Comments can be added for each Testsheet, but not to the Ruletest file.