Too many chained references - Ignore when using LINQ

[jacerhea]

I think the inspection for "Too many chained references " should ignore anything in the LINQ namespace.

[citizenmatt]

Hmm. This is an interesting one, because it might be that you're using a custom SelectMany extension method from another namespace, or even a custom operator, DistinctIgnoringCase or something.

I wonder if there's a good way to generalise this? Perhaps extend the check for "fluent" interfaces, where it doesn't count methods that return the same type that's passed in, e.g. IEnumerable<T>. It would need to ignore the actual type of T, for things like Select((string s) => s.Length, which would start as IEnumerable<string> and return IEnumerable<int>.

That would mean the chained LINQ methods are ignored, but if you have too many chained references after standard LINQ, they'd be marked as smelly code.

How does that sound?

[jacerhea]

This may require a few special cases. My suggestion would be to ignore or increase the allowable threshold when

1. Using extension methods where both the first input argument and return type implement IEnumerable<T>.
2. Using extension methods where both the first input argument and return type are the same type.