Rule-Based Analysis

Note:

Rule-based analysis is only available for native COBOL applications and on Windows platforms.

Visual COBOL provides a variety of analysis queries (rules) that you can execute on individual COBOL programs or on an entire project to gain statistics to help improve the productivity.

Code analysis queries are referred to as rules and groups of rules are referred to as rule sets. In the IDE, you can run code analysis on individual COBOL programs or an entire project by executing a rule or an entire rule set on them. You can also enable code analysis to run each time a project is built.

Outside of the IDE, you can run code analysis when building projects using MSBuild at the command line (in Visual Studio) or using Ant targets (in Eclipse). This enables you to include code analysis in your continuous integration (CI) processes.

Visual COBOL comes with a set of rules and rule sets that include some of the most-commonly used analysis queries. These are generally organized in the following categories:

64 bit readiness - includes code analysis queries to help check whether your code is going to perform as expected when compile for 64-bit platforms.
Coding Standards - includes code analysis queries to help identify places in the code that could possibly violate coding standards or places in the code that might be candidates for further analysis in reducing complexity or unnecessary code.
Performance - includes code analysis queries to help verify your code and determine where you could use more efficient constructs.
Within Entire Program - includes code analysis queries that check the code across an entire application such as queries for finding unexecuted statements, unreachable paragraphs, or data that is defined but is never used.
General Queries - includes code analysis queries not covered by the other categories

In addition to the rules supplied with the installation, you can import more rules and rule sets into Visual COBOL. Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer includes many more standard rules which you can reuse within the Visual COBOL and this gives you the option to be able to customize these to create your own site-specific analyst functions which you can then publish out to your development teams. Contact Micro Focus for further information.