Domain Violations

Domain violations occur when a symbol uses other Sets as domain(s) – and is thus of domain type regular, see Symbol Domain – and uses a domain entry in its records that is not present in the corresponding referenced domain set. Such a domain violation will lead to a GDX error when writing the data.

For example, the symbol j in the following example contains domain violations because j is defined over domain set i and the records entry “grayslake” is not present in i.

library(gamstransfer)
m <- Container$new()
i <- Set$new(m, "i", records = c("seattle", "san-diego", "washington_dc"))
j <- Set$new(m, "j", i)
records <- data.frame(cities = c("grayslake", "washington_dc"))
j$setRecords(records)

Trying to write this container to a GDX file will fail. To ask for domain violations, call the method Symbol$getDomainViolations(). It returns a list of DomainViolation objects with respect to each dimension of the symbol. This list can then be used to resolve the domain violations.

> dv <- j$getDomainViolations()
> dv
[[1]]
GAMS Transfer: DomainViolation with properties:
Symbol: j
dimension:
domain: i
violations: grayslake

The GAMS Transfer R feature of domain forwarding offers an automatic expansion of the domain set with the violated entries in order to eliminate domain violations.

Note

Checking for domain violations is not a part of Symbol$isValid() for performance reasons.

Note

The method for automatically resolving the domain violations can be convenient, but it effectively disables domain checking, which is a valuable tool for error detection. We encourage to use domain forwarding as rarely as possible. The same holds for using relaxed domain informaiton when regular domain information would be possible.