Code Analysis

Code analysis helps you understand and optimize your COBOL applications. Visual COBOL offers the following types of analysis:

Application Analysis Server

Visual COBOL enables you to connect to a Rocket® Enterprise Analyzer or Rocket® COBOL Analyzer repository and use their application analysis features to analyze and understand the effect of your changes on your application.

Restriction: Application Analysis Server is only available for local and remote native COBOL projects on Windows platforms only. It is not supported for programs opened using the Application Workflow Modeller.

Analysis Assistant

Analysis Assistant is a natural language chat window integrated into the IDE that answers queries about the behavior of your COBOL applications with the assistance of graphs, reports and code suggestions.

Restriction: This functionality is available only if you have the following licensed products installed:
  • Visual COBOL, version 10.0 or later, and
  • Enterprise Analyzer or COBOL Analyzer, version 10.0 or later.

Analysis Services

Visual COBOL enables you to perform a data flow analysis and view the program flow graphs for your code. Data Flow Analysis traces the incoming and outgoing flow paths of data items. This allows you to see how changing a data item affects the program. Program Flow Graph is a call hierarchy graph that helps you understand the structure of a program. It shows the call flow for paragraphs in a COBOL program.
Restriction: Analysis Services are only available for local and remote native COBOL projects on Windows platforms only. It is not supported for programs opened using the Application Workflow Modeller.

Rules-based analysis

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.

Restriction: Rule-based analysis is only available for local and remote native COBOL projects on Windows platforms only. It is not supported for programs opened using the Application Workflow Modeller.

COBOL Source Information

COBOL Source Information (CSI) provides a quick and easy way of providing you with information about your program when you are working on it. You enter a query in the Quick Browse dialog box and CSI returns the results of the query in the Search view.

Restriction: COBOL Source Information (CSI) is only supported for native COBOL.