Write a rule

We’re retiring the Assistants feature later in 2023 — but you can still use it with older versions of Sketch, or with the Command Line Interface. Find out more

This guide shows how to create an Assistant rule that checks the contents of Text Layers to make sure they don’t include “Lorem Ipsum” placeholder text. It finishes describing how to evolve the rule to disallow any string using Assistant configuration.

💡 Make sure you’ve already followed the Getting Started guide. You’ll need a working local Assistant project that you can edit, rebuild and see the resulting changes in Sketch if you want to follow along with this guide.

Adding a custom rule

If you’ve only made minimal changes to the starter project then you should find the example Hello World rule defined in the src/index.ts file, alongside the Assistant definition itself.

Begin to rework the Hello World rule into a rule that disallows lorem ipsum in text content. Feel free to replace the contents of src/index.ts wholesale with the below:

import {
  AssistantPackage,
  RuleDefinition,
} from '@sketch-hq/sketch-assistant-types'

const textNoLoremIpsum: RuleDefinition = {
  rule: async (context) => {
    // Rule logic will go here
  },
  name: 'sketch-assistant-template/text-no-lorem-ipsum',
  title: 'Text should not contain lorem ipsum',
  description:
    'Reports a violation when text layers contain lorem ipsum placeholder',
}

const assistant: AssistantPackage = async () => {
  return {
    name: 'sketch-assistant-template',
    rules: [textNoLoremIpsum],
    config: {
      rules: {
        'sketch-assistant-template/text-no-lorem-ipsum': {
          active: true,
        },
      },
    },
  }
}

export default assistant

A few points to note:

  • A rule’s name is its unique identifier in the Assistants ecosystem, so by convention we prefix rule names with their parent Assistant’s name separated by a /.
  • Rules are added to an Assistant package by including them in its rules array.
  • Rules are not active by default, they have to be explicitly turned on in the Assistant’s configuration object.

Implement rule logic

Rule logic is implemented in the function set as the rule property in the rule definition object. So far we’ve just defined an empty anonymous async function:

async (context) => {
  // Rule logic will go here
}

For the vast majority of cases you’ll be able to implement your rule just using the API passed in via the context argument. You aren’t limited to this API though, feel free to use helper functions, npm modules or anything else you need to get the job done.

Let’s add the logic for disallowing lorem ipsum in text layers. We’ll do this in a standard iterate, test, report pattern that’s applicable to many rules:

  1. Iterate the Sketch document’s objects
  2. Test whether the objects meet some condition
  3. If so, report it
async (context) => {
  const { utils } = context
  // Iterate
  for (const layer of utils.objects.text) {
    const value = layer.attributedString.string
    // Test
    if (value.toLowerCase().includes('lorem ipsum')) {
      // Report
      utils.report(`Layer “${layer.name}” contains “lorem ipsum”`, layer)
    }
  }
}

💡 If you haven’t already now might be a good time to run npm run package-tarball and test your work in Sketch.

A few points to note:

  • We’ve used the utils.objects.text utility to iterate across all Text Layer objects in the document.
  • We’ve used the utils.report utility to report a problem to Sketch. At minimum a report must include a message, and then optionally one or more Sketch document objects related to the problem.
  • If you’re using Visual Studio Code you should be noticing rich intellisense and TypeScript compiler hints for both the rule utilities and Sketch document objects

Making a configurable rule

At the moment the rule is hard coded to look for the lorem ipsum string. By generalizing it to accept an option we make it configurable, and the Assistant more widely useful to Sketch users once published.

Here’s the new, generalized rule function,

async (context) => {
  const { utils } = context

  // Get a configuration option named "pattern"
  const pattern = utils.getOption('pattern')
  if (typeof pattern !== 'string') throw Error()

  // Iterate
  for (const layer of utils.objects.text) {
    const value = layer.attributedString.string
    // Test
    if (value.includes(pattern)) {
      // Report
      utils.report(`Layer “${layer.name}” contains “${pattern}”`, layer)
    }
  }
}

A few things to note here:

  • We’re using the utils.getOption utility to extract a named option for the current rule from the Assistant’s current configuration.
  • Rules are for logic not opinions, so they should avoid hard-coding default configuration values. For this reason we throw an error if the configuration option does not have the correct data type. Throwing an error like this also handily narrows the type to satisfy the TypeScript compiler

We’re not quite done yet, because while our rule is now configurable we haven’t actually configured it yet. We do this by adding a value for our pattern option to the Assistant configuration.

Below we’re defining the new generalized rule and naming it text-disallow, as well as setting pattern to Type something. This will have the interesting effect of reporting a problem for any text layer added to the canvas left with default copy, which could often indicate sloppy work.

import {
  AssistantPackage,
  RuleDefinition,
} from '@sketch-hq/sketch-assistant-types'

const textDisallow: RuleDefinition = {
  rule: async (context) => {
    // Copy and paste from above
  },
  name: 'sketch-assistant-template/text-disallow',
  title: (config) => `Text should not contain "${config.pattern}"`,
  description:
    'Reports a violation when text layers contain a configurable text pattern',
}

const assistant: AssistantPackage = async () => {
  return {
    name: 'sketch-assistant-template',
    rules: [textDisallow],
    config: {
      rules: {
        'sketch-assistant-template/text-disallow': {
          active: true,
          pattern: 'Type something',
        },
      },
    },
  }
}

export default assistant

💡 If you felt limited by having to test your Assistant in Sketch during this guide, without access to familiarities like console.log then have a read of our Running and testing Assistants guide. This will discuss how to test your Assistant in Node, or run it from the command line.

👉 Next steps could include Extending an Assistant, or deep diving into the API reference.