INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT (IDE) FOR NETWORK SECURITY CONFIGURATION FILES

An integrated development environment (IDE) preprocesses a configuration file including security rules. The preprocessing maps object names in the security rules to associated object values based on object definitions for the object names. Responsive to the configuration file being opened in an editor, the IDE provides the editor with access to preprocessing results. Each security rule in the opened configuration file is searched for object names. The IDE links each object name found in the search to an associated object value mapped thereto by the mapping performed during the preprocessing. The IDE receives a selection of an object name in a security rule of the opened configuration file and generates for display the associated object value linked to the selected object name.