5.1.
Default convention for display names
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This section explains how RiskAnalytics derives display names from the variable names in the program code.
By default, RiskAnalytics derives the display names of parameters and components in a model’s hierarchy as follows.
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Remove prefixes: "sub", "parm" or "out"
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In the resulting string, replace upper case characters with a space followed by the corresponding lower case character
Example: For the component "subClaimsGenerator" the default display name is "claims generator". The parameter "parmContractStrategy" yields as "contract strategy".
This naming convention is useful because a model or component developer can focus on the business content and does not have to worry about setting display names.
Yet, there are two problems which such a naming convention cannot resolve:
- If you re-use a component which contains other
components (i.e. composed component) more than once in one model, then all the
contained components have the same display name. Note that this is only the
display name. The model knows to distinguish them by their place (i.e. path) in
the model hierarchy.
This might be undesirable because the same business component can have different meaning in different places of a model. - Such a naming convention can only provide the
display names in one language which is usually English, as most programmers
write their code in pseudo-English. What should be done if the users of a model
are French, German or Spanish speaking? Or even worse, if a model is intended
for a multi-national insurance group and German users would like to work with
the German display names, English user with the English ones and so on. In this
case, the application has to switch the display names according to the user’s
language settings.
This is a well-known IT problem and is referred to as Internationalization.
