Importing Rule Sets into the IDE

Visual COBOL comes with a set of predefined rules and rule sets for a number of code analysis queries to run on COBOL applications. In addition to these, Visual COBOL provides an import mechanism to enable you to add more rules and rule sets into the IDE.

Note: In addition to the rules supplied with the installation, you can import more rules and rule sets into Visual COBOL. 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.

Nested rule sets exported from Enterprise Analyzer can be imported into the Visual COBOL IDE:

To import new rules and rule sets into the IDE:

  1. Copy the .xml files that contain the new rules into a directory on your machine.
  2. In the IDE, click Window > Preferences > Micro Focus > COBOL > Code Analysis.
  3. Click Edit in the Directory for additional rules definition files section.
  4. In the Edit Directory dialog box, click Browse and navigate to the directory that contains the .xml files with the new rules you want to import.
  5. Click Finish.

    This imports the files into Visual COBOL and adds the newly imported rules and rule sets to the list on the Code Analysis preferences page.