Our most frequently asked support question goes something like this: “I see the graphs on your website, but how do I get them in Understand?”.  With Understand 1.4 the only way to get a call tree other other graphical view was to right click on the function and choose “Graphical Views->Call Tree”.  That is totally obvious to some new users and to others a huge mystery. And that is understandable. Not everybody has used applications with right click context menus.

Understand 2.0 keeps the context menus, but also adds a new Graph Toolbar:

This toolbar item updates whenever you click on an entity anywhere in source or any of Understand’s graphical or other informational views.

To get a graph, just pull down the menu:

and the graph will pop right up.

Our hierarchy charts have always shown one relationship, for instance “Call”, on a chart. We’ve just introduced “Butterfly” charts, which will show two relationships that are the inverse of each other. For instance, “Call and CallBy”, “Include and Include By”, “Derived and Derived By”.

For instance, here is a butterfly chart for a function (click on it to see it bigger):

The function queried was “add_data_in_datablock”. Note that it is in the middle, with calls it makes to the right, and those it is called-by to the left.

These graphs are available for every entity that we have hierarchical graphs for.

We just added this toolbar section to the Understand 2.0 toolbar:

It controls workspace splitting. Here are some examples. Click on them to see them bigger.

Single document view workspace:

Split workspace – horizontal & vertical

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In Using Understand with an external editor – SlickEdit I explained how to hook up Understand to run with SlickEdit. As a follow up, here are the commands to setup the same Understand menu inside of EMACS, Visual Studio, and Vi. Do let me know if I made any mistakes here since I’m not an expert on these editors.

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I’ve covered making Snapshots from the Current Database and by checking out source to an alternate location in earlier posts.  Now I’m going to tell you the EASY way to do it…. Just use TrackBack.

Assuming you have had TrackBack B443 or later monitoring your source trees, you can recreate the state of any monitored directory at any time. This includes file modification, file existance, file renaming, everything.

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User tools are a convenient way to quickly access external tools or other applications. In an earlier post, Ken shared his SVN User Tools, which provide quick access to version control commands right inside the application.  If you use a different version control system, or want to launch another application, you’ll need to know how to make your own user tools.

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A frequent complaint of Understand 1.4 users was that unless their project was syncronized to an MSVC project it was difficult to keep Understand projects up to date about new files and especially hard to keep files removed from a project from showing up again when adding new code.

Understand 2.0 addresses this with the “Watched Dir” concept. By default any directory you add is a “watched dir”.

Understand 2.0 scans all project “watched dir” for new/removed files and the project file list updated automatically.  Importantly, any modifications you have manually made – either by removing or by changing file filters is remembered.  In 2.0 you only have to remove a file once it won’t come back unless you add it specifically.

You can trigger a rescan  with the Project->Rescan button:

Or automatically on a schedule with the Project scheduler available in Project->Configure Project:

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It is very common to walk a call, call by, or class hierarchy tree seeing what is “going on”.  You can do this in the Information Browser, or in the various graph views we have provided for years.

A new way in Understand 2.0 is the Entity Explorer window.  It permits keyboard based fast exploring of reference hiearchies with syncronized source and informatoin updates.

To see this just click on any entity that has relationships. For instance, a function, and choose “Explorer”.  It will list the reference hiearchies availble to explore:

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Have you ever looked at a call tree and wondered “is somefunction()” in there?

B453, which you can download now,  introduces a new “incremental search” feature to the Information Browser that makes answering questions like that a snap.

To use it hit select where you want to start searching from and then hit the Ctrl-F key while in the IB or click on the  icon.

That brings up a search box on the bottom of the IB:

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I was working hard on doing nothing on the 4^th of July holiday and didn’t do a Build Metrics post about B450. Now I’m ready to do that and I find that I forgot to make an Understand 2.0 snapshot of the source for B450.

I have a couple options:

1. Check out B450 source to an alternate location and make a snapshot from it.
2. Look up the revision tag time for B450 and use TrackBack to make a snapshot.

I’ll choose #1 just for an example. Next time, I’ll show #2.

First, I’ll check my SVN e-mail log to see when B450 was tagged:

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