Dear Visual Expert users,

We're pleased to announce that we've added a new Blog section to Visual Expert Website.
The Visual Expert blog allows you to easily find all Visual Expert articles, news and tutorials.

You can keep using the support website to communicate with our support team.

Visit the Blog | Contact the support | Read the Update List

Use the Exceptions tab in the Settings Menu to help Visual Expert better understand your code. An exception processes a given function or variable and creates a supplementary relationship between two components of the application. Find additional references, improve the results of the macro “open hierarchy” and generate more hyperlinks in the source code view.

Go to Add, and select “Open Window Exception”. This exception extends the results of the macro “open hierarchy” by tracking more calls between Windows, Menus and Application Objects.

Define either a window opening function or a variable containing the name of the opened window, by declaring the type of item it is, and selecting the specific item. You can also select the function’s parameter containing the opened object using the dropdown list.

Once the exception has been set, close the Settings window. A pop-up requesting you to re-analyse your code will appear. Select yes so that your project will take into account the new exceptions declared.

Depending on the size and complexity of your code, Visual Expert may require 10x the size of your code in space available.

There are a number of ways to create more space for new projects:

1. Select where your temporary files are stored. Visual Expert creates temporary files when it runs the analysis. You can choose a drive with available space by going to Settings, General and choosing which folder stores the generated files in the “Temporary Files” Section.

2. Delete old analyses of an existing project. In the Settings Menu > Project Settings > History Tab, you can select and remove previous analyses. For examples, ones that have been aborted in the past.

3. Delete old projects. Go to File - Open Project and select a project that you no longer need available. Then select “Remove”.

Visual Expert 2015 contains 2 macros (options in the left view) to help you isolate libraries within a large PB application in order to separate several modules: PBL Dependencies and External Dependencies.

1. PBL dependencies
Select a PBL, and use the button PBL Dependencies to see all the PBLs related to the selected library. This macro is similar to a called hierarchy, but at PBL level.

2. External Dependencies
Select a PBL, and use the option External Dependencies to get details of the items called outside of a PBL. In the screenshot below, see how w_resp_customer_search is calling various items from other PBLs outside of demopfc.pbl

Use the parameter option (wrench) to filter the kind of references you wish to display.

Visual Expert allows you to run a global search across your application (and also across multiple applications!). Visual Expert doesn't run a regular text search like most applications: as well as giving you the location of the item directly in the source code, the VE search gives you rich results including type, container, and hierarchy information. Because of this, the search may take some time to load.

There are a couple of tricks to making the process run faster:

To really speed up the search, specify the string of code you wish to search for in the Source code field and use regular expressions/Match Case to narrow down your search even more.

Filling in the second line, component name, will also help to speed up the search; however, because VE uses an algorithm to cross reference the source field with the component field, the search may still take some time to return results.

Note that using the "Search into:" box will not necessarily speed up your search, as this filter is processed after Visual Expert has fetched the container and hierarchy information.

Finally, we do recommend keeping “Show parent hierarchy” selected for a richer result.

Learn how to share the knowledge of your PowerBuilder application among the team and to help maintain it as your team evolves. See how to manage unexpected side effects during modifications to your application.

For those of you already familiar with Visual Expert, tune in to see how Visual Expert 7 improves the sharing experience, manages even larger sets of code and better automates your analyses. See how several developers can now simultaneously use the same VE project and share the results of an impact analyses.

In this presentation, Christophe Dufourmantelle will demonstrate how Visual Expert lets you:

• Explore and understand relationships within complex code
• Automate an impact analysis to avoid the side effects of modifications

Check out the webinar here (Please sign in to PowerBuilderTV to view the webinar)