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.
The Understand 2.0 editor’s “Browse Mode” makes all entities in the editor behave like links in a web browser. With a single click you can visit and update the Information Browser.
In both 1.4 and 2.0 the usual way of exploring/learning about code in the editor is via the Right Click context menu. For instance, if I want to learn about allocstrAppend() I right click on it:
The Understand 2.0GUI has command line options that may prove useful to you automation and personal efficiency reasons.
To see the options, just start Understand with “-help”:
%understand -help
I’ve just realized that while I’ve written a bunch of posts referring to snapshots and using snapshots, I’ve never explained what they are and how they can fit into a software engineer’s workflow. Hence the “missing piece of the puzzle” clip art above.
Q: What are snapshots?
A: A snapshot is a binary store included within an Understand database. A database can hold be any number of snapshots. Each contains three things:
Q: What are snapshots used for?
A: They are used throughout Understand 2.0 to provide details and metrics about what has changed in source code between two points of time. The “Change”, “Metrics”, and “Estimate” menus all use snapshots intensively.
“Change” will tell you what has changed at the semantic level. For instance, what classes or types changed, versus just what files/lines changed.
“Metrics” can tell you the number of semantic changes – classes removed, changed, added, so forth.
Metrics have always been very tightly coupled with software engineering. Love them or hate them, there is usually no avoiding them. In Understand 2.0 we've significantly increased our ability to provide useful metrics about your project.
The metrics capabilities vary depending on what version of Understand you are using: Understand Engineer provides high level project metrics, Understand Pro lets you explore and export project and entity level metrics, and Understand Analyst lets you do all that, create custom graphs, and even compare how metrics are changing over time (trend analysis).
All of this Metrics capability is accessed through the new Metrics menu.
| Engineer | Pro | Analyst |
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