Overview of architecture

After clicking the Search for refactorings... button AutomaticRefactoringAction is run by IDEA internal mechanisms. It receives current Project and AnalysisScope as its parameters. Project is just a current project and AnalysisScope stores all the data (set of files) that should be processed. Both these objects are passed to a RefactoringExecutionContext which calculates metrics, executes various algorithms and shows the results to the user.

Metrics calculation is performed by another plugin, MetricsReloaded, that we build upon. Each metric is represented by a MetricInstance — actual metric, upper and lower thresholds and enable flag. All MetricInstances are stored in MetricsProfile. Metrics are calculated by MetricsExecutionContextImpl and the results are stored in MetricsRun.

Entity represents a project entity (class, method or field). Each of these entities has a vector of features that contains a subset of metrics from MetricsRun. Also, each Entity has a list of relevant properties. RelevantProperties is a storage of classes, methods, and fields that are somehow related to the original Entity. Each of these properties has a certain weight.

After metrics calculation is over RefactoringExecutionContext runs EntitySearcher to find entities in a given scope. In order to filter unacceptable entities EntitySearcher uses FinderStrategy. FinderStrategy is also responsible for giving initial weights to properties described above. EntitySearcher produces EntitySearchResult that stores all found entities with their RelevantProperties.

Finally, each Algorithm is being run, receiving EntitySearchResult as input and producing refactoring suggestions as output.