In a hierarchical tree-like structure, like the QM™ model, it is often useful to refer to items by means of fully-qualified names. A name is fully-qualified when it "is complete in the sense that it includes (a) all names in the hierarchic sequence above the given element and (b) the name of the given element itself". The following picture shows examples of the fully-qualified names of various items in a QM model:

Examples of Fully-Qualified Item Names

As you can see from the picture above, QM™ uses two colons (::) to separate the list of parent-items of the given item.

To avoid ambiguities, the QM™ modeling tool requires providing the fully-qualified names of items in several circumstances, such as specifying the Superclass of a given class, inside the Code-Generation Directives, and in the item references embedded into comments in the generated code.

Note: Just like most high-level language compilers, QM™ recognizes only a limited number of characters in each name level as unique, and abbreviates the rest of the name. Currently, this limit is set to 16 unique leading characters at each level of the name, with the total length of the fully-qualified name not exceeding 99 characters.

QM ModelWorking with Packages