MATLAB Design Details

R2026b
Since R2026b

Metric ID

modeldesign.MATLABMaintainability[slcomp.MATLABDesignDetails]

Description

This metric returns detailed maintainability measurements for each MATLAB® design layer in a unit. The measurements include executable lines of code, decision count, Halstead difficulty, and the operator and operand counts used to compute Halstead difficulty. Use this metric to investigate which specific MATLAB design layers contribute to high complexity in a unit.

Supported Artifacts

This metric collects metric results for Units in the project. To control what the dashboard classifies as a unit, see Categorize Models in Hierarchy as Components or Units.

Computation Details

This metric aggregates measurements from multiple underlying calculations:

Decisions — The metric calculates the number of decisions in MATLAB code by taking the cyclomatic complexity calculated by the Code Analyzer and subtracting one to exclude the default path. The metric counts decisions from if, elseif, while, for, parfor, try, and case statements. It ignores else, otherwise, and catch statements because they form the default path. For more information, see checkcode and Measure Code Complexity Using Cyclomatic Complexity.

Halstead Difficulty — The metric calculates Halstead difficulty based on the number of total and unique operators and operands in the code. Commented code is ignored, and only code without syntax errors is analyzed.

The metric calculates the Halstead difficulty, D, using the equation D=n12×N2n2. n1 is the number of unique operators, N2 is the total number of operands, and n2 is the number of unique operands.

Collection

To collect data for this metric, execute the metric engine with the metric ID.

metric_engine = metric.Engine;
results = execute(metric_engine,"modeldesign.MATLABMaintainability[slcomp.MATLABDesignDetails]")

View the metric result values for a specific unit.

results(1).Value
results(1).ScopeAlias

You can also collect all MATLAB maintainability metrics at once by using the group ID.

results = execute(metric_engine,"modeldesign.MATLABMaintainability[]")
Use the MetricID property of each result to identify which metric the result belongs to.

Results

The metric returns an array of metric.Result objects, one for each unit in the project. Use the Value property of the metric result object to view the metric result values. Use the ScopeId and ScopeAlias properties to identify which unit the result belongs to.

The ScopeAlias property returns the name of the unit.

The Value property returns missing when the unit does not contain any MATLAB design layers. When MATLAB design layers exist, the Value property returns a structure with these fields:

  • Decisions — Number of decision points in the design layer

  • ELOC — Number of executable lines of code

  • HalsteadDifficulty — Halstead difficulty score

  • TotalOperands — Total number of operands

  • TotalOperators — Total number of operators

  • UniqueOperands — Number of distinct operands

  • UniqueOperators — Number of distinct operators

  • MATLABElement — Structure identifying the design layer, with fields:

    • Alias — Name of the MATLAB design layer

    • URI — Unique resource identifier for the design layer

  • ELOCBinEdge — The executable lines of code (eLOC) histogram bin that this design layer falls into

  • DecisionBinEdge — The decision count histogram bin that this design layer falls into

  • HalsteadDifficultyBinEdge — The Halstead difficulty histogram bin that this design layer falls into

See Also

Topics