What's the idiomatic way of evaluating a rule once, but without any class scanning?

[pivovarit]

We have a rule that we'd like to enforce project-wide - that would be a consistency of some files that should be present in multiple directories.

We could trick the analyzer to do ArchRuleDefinition.theClass(Object.class) or something equally hacky, but is there an idiomatic solution that doesn't involve scanning classes which can be lengthy?

[hankem]

The rule definition is independent of the class file import. The latter is described in §6.1 Import of the ArchUnit User Guide.

If I understood correctly, you want to optimize the import to skip lengthy classes and only include some files? This should be easily doable with a custom ImportOption.

[pivovarit]

I'm aware of that, but the thing is... I don't really want to analyze any Java classes. It's just a generic standalone rule, which would be more/less: ensure that matching migration files are present in all directories. Those migration files are plain SQL files.

Technically, I don't need ArchUnit to implement that, but it would be convenient to have the ability to have such a check included as part of the arch-unit suite.

[hankem]

Hm, I see. Then ArchUnit might currently not be the best fit for your problem. I'm not even sure whether you could express a test that SQL files must be present, as ArchRules can only operate on (information derived from) imported JavaClasses.

[pivovarit]

Ok, thanks for the clarification - my main motivation for using ArchUnit was the ability to ship this rule alongside N other standard rules