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.

You can Go to Settings > Project Settings > General Tab and check the option ‘Display warnings and errors occurring during the analysis’. After checking this box, re-analyse your project (shortcut: ctrl + F5).

You will see in the progress window of your analysis, any errors or warnings that have arisen since then. You will then have the option to send a ticket to support using the button “Send log to support”.

This will launch the support wizard, that will allow you to send us a ticket directly with the errors that have been found during the analysis.

Have a long list of items expanded in your Main View?  You can return to the flat list of components by selecting the Home button, or by pressing F5.

Note: This doesn’t refresh your analysis; if you have made changes in your code and want to re-run the analysis, you can use the shortcut Ctrl +F5.

After months of testing and much appreciated feedback, Visual Expert 7 is now generally available!

Visual Expert has been completely redesigned to better meet the needs of PowerBuilder developers. 

It has an entirely new architecture and a modernized interface, with the same indispensable features:

• Generating Detailed Technical Documentation
• Transfering the knowledge of your Application between teammates
• Better exploring your code

All-new Architecture

Visual Expert now allows for larger amounts of code to be analyzed while freeing up your computer's resources!
Handle your projects by scheduling your analysis and documentation for whenever you need it, or with a background analysis whenever you're not using your computer. Access previous analyses of your projects that are stored by Visual Expert 7.
Host your Visual Expert projects server side, and let your whole team share the same analysis while delegating different tasks.

Extended Analyses

New ways to analyse your objects have been added. Your favourite macros from VE 5 are back as well.
Locate External References, Overrides, Dropdown DWs, Main PB Objects and more!
Better define your global searchwith more options

Multiple Applications

Analyze multiple applications in the same Project
Run Impact Analyses on shared tables, Stored procedures, dlls…

New Documentation

The documentation generator has been redeveloped to produce a richer documention (see an example here)
You can now schedule the documentation and update it automatically in the background

If you would like to get Visual Expert 7, please create a ticket in the support center for more information and let us accompany you through the setup process and explain the new features Visual Expert 7 has to offer. 

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)

The Global Search feature in Visual Expert allows you to search throughout your application; it now has more flexibility and criteria to help you refine your search. 

Match Case

Like the previous versions, you can search a string in the name of the component or in the source code.But you can now decide whether you would like the search to take into account the capitalization of letters by selecting the checkbox Match Case.

String Positioning

Two new listboxes allow restricting the search with the following options:

• Contains: search for words containing the specified string, whatever the position of the string in the word (default value)
• Starts With: search only for words starting with the specified string
• Ends With: search only for words ending with the specified string
• Exact Word: search only for words matching exactly the specified string
• Regex: refine your search with a regular expression. 

Filter on multiple type of items

Previous versions of Visual Expert only allowed you to select one type of element to search within. Now with Visual Expert 7, you can search within multiple items at the same time. For example, you can limit the search to the object types Windows and UserObjects.

Searching into items has been made easier in Visual Expert 7. Items are organized into categories (PowerBuilder, Database, Others) in the drop down list. 

Multithreading

Continue to browse your code while the search runs in the background.