The Understand APIs provide a lot of options for automating tedious tasks. I wrote an Interactive Report plugin to automate generating different Understand graphs. For example, this is useful if you need to save the control flow graphs of all functions in a project, or document the Declaration graphs for all classes.

The plugin also generates an html file to quickly navigate the generated graphs:

The options dialog lets you pick which graph you want to generate, what format you want the files saved in, and where to save them. You can also specify advanced options that correspond to the options available on the graphs right click menu in the GUI

You can grab the Batch Graph Generator in the Interactive Reports section of our GUI Plugins Page. You’ll also find installation instructions there. Enjoy!

We just added a plugin to identify duplicated lines of code. You can grab it at the bottom of our GUI Plugins page.

Update April,26 2012 – I’ve made some extensive changes to this script to improve performance and remove repeated results

We’ve developed a UML Class Diagram for Understand. You can grab it from the plugins page. Update: This diagram is now shipped with Understand and is available in the Graphs menu.

Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a ‘refactoring’) does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it’s less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.  — Martin Fowler  http://www.refactoring.com/

In other words, refactoring is making your code cleaner, safer, and easier to use. Understand can be a very powerful tool in your re-factoring arsenal. Here are a few ways you can use Understand in your refactoring process.

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