For Input you can chose to use the selected text, the text of the entire current file, or not to use any input. You can output your results into the command output window like previous versions allowed, discard it, copy it to the clipboard, or overwrite the current selected text or file.

For example, the following would replace the word int with float in the currently highlighted text:

Yes, Find & Replace would do the same thing, it’s just an example

An example of replacing an entire file would be when using astyle to format your code. In that blog posting we had to overwrite the current file, and then reload it. Now we can feed the file text straight into the command and then the editor contents get automatically overwritten. No need to confirm the file reload every time:

As with many new Understand features, this was requested by a cutomer, we thought it was a good idea and that other people would use it, so we implemented it. If you have a good idea don’t hesitate to let us know. Just drop us an email at support@scitools.com

So you can quickly turn this:

Into this:

We plan on implementing astyle into the editor at some point in the future, but I’m not so patient, and I decided to use our plugin mechanism to do it now, and will show you how.

There are two ways to run astyle from inside Understand, as an Interactive Report plugin, or as a custom user tool. Either way, first you’ll need to install or build astyle you can download it from here.

Interactive Report

The Interactive report integrates directly with the file context menu in Understand. Download the plugin from here(right click and save as). To install it, just move the file to SciTools\conf\plugin\User\IReport\ and restart Understand.
To run the plugin, right click on a File, select Interactive Reports and Beautify

At which point you’ll be presented with the options window:

The first field is pretty straight forward, just navigate to where the astyle executable is installed.

The rest of the dialog may seem overwhelming, but the tricky part is figuring out what your “style” is. Astyle has 5 predefined styles, and chances are that one of them will be pretty close to what you like.

Astyle’s documentation goes into more detail about each of these styles, but here is a rough overview:

namespace foospace
{
int Foo()
{
if (isBar)
{
bar();
return 1;
}
else
return 0;
}
}

namespace foospace
{
int Foo()
{
if (isBar)
{
bar();
return 1;
}
else
return 0;
}
}

namespace foospace {
int Foo() {
if (isBar) {
bar();
return 1;
} else
return 0;
}
}

namespace foospace
{
int Foo()
{
if (isBar) {
bar();
return 1;
} else
return 0;
}
}

class foospace {
int Foo() {
if (isBar) {
bar();
return 1;
} else
return 0;
}
}

If one of these appeals to you as is, just select it from the “Predefined Style” section. If you want to modify one, select it and the other options in the dialog will allow you to override the default settings for a style. For more details about what the command does, select “Display the help text” in the Action section:

When you are ready to run it, you can either preview the changes in a separate window, or apply them directly to the source code. Of course I would suggest previewing the changes until you figure out exactly what your style is. Note that if your project uses relative paths or named roots, only the preview will work right now since the file naming is different, but you can still copy and paste

User Tool

If you already know what astyle command line options you want to use, you can setup a user tool  to quickly transform a file. Again, this only works for projects with absolute paths.

So here are the command line options I want to use with astyle:

astyle –style=ansi -t -B -w

To implement these as a user tool, I select Tools | User Tools | Configure

Then I create a new tool. I name it and provide the path to the astyle executable. Then I provide the parameters. The lipstick icon is optional

I also decided to bind this to a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl Shift B). You can set the keyboard shortcuts in Tool | Options | Key Bindings.

Now if I run into an ugly file, I can just hit Ctrl Shift B, and bam, pretty code!

Launch an External Application

For example, suppose I want to open the current file in Notepad. First select Tools | Configure User Tools

Enter the name you want to appear for your tool, and the executable that is being launched:

The parameters section is a little more tricky. What you enter here will vary wildly based on what application you are launching. If you look at the arrow on the right of the parameters checkbox, you will see a list of variables that Understand can pass to another application.

In this case we want to pass Notepad the name of the current file, so we select $CurFile

If the application needs a working directory specified, you can set that, and if you would like to specify an icon for the tool, you can select something different than the application. These settings aren’t needed for this tool, so I leave them alone. Likewise there is no command line output and this is not an STI Perl script, so I’ll leave those checkboxes blank.

Finally we need to decide where we want the tool to appear inside of Understand. There are several option.

Pop up Menu Appears anywhere you right click	Main Menu Appears under Tools | User Tools	Toolbar Appears in the User Tools Toolbar

This tool will now open the current file in Notepad. Here are the complete settings.

Here are a couple more examples of some basic tools.

Launch Build System

In this sample I want to launch my Make script. Note the parameter. In this case I don’t want to send it a file name, I want it to ask me what to build. The $Prompt parameters will ask you for input. When I run this tool, it will ask me for my build target, which is what I wanted

Then the build output displays in the Understand command window. The great part of building in Understand is that if there are errors, you can simply click on the error message and Understand will jump straight to that line of code in the editor

Code Lookup

In this sample, I want to lookup the selected text in MSDN’s library.  There are many different ways to do this, but I think I’ll launch firefox with the following parameters:

http://www.google.com/search?q=$CurSelection site:msdn.microsoft.com+OR+site:support.microsoft.com

This will search for the current highlighted text with Google on the MSDN site and the support site.