Populating the Worksheet

Refining the Worksheet

Chapter 6: Customizing the Analysis Tools

In this session, you find out how to customize the analysis tools and their settings.

6.1 Overview

In this session, you customize the analysis tools to look for the monetary elements that are peculiar to the Order project. Every application has its own peculiarities and you need to get to know your application, so that you can establish the settings and tools that will produce the most relevant assessment of where changes are required. In this session, you:

• Create a new group of default settings with the literals and data item names that are appropriate to the Order project.

• Find out how to pass the new settings to other users, so they can use them without having to work out the relevant settings for themselves.

• Create a tool specifically designed for searching for the relevant monetary constants in the Order application. This new tool combines the sequence of tools that you used to create the set of monetary constants and captures the settings you used for each tool. In this way, you produce a tool that can automatically reproduce the results that earlier you created manually.

We recommend that you spend some time initially establishing the tools and settings appropriate to your application. You do this as part of your initial analysis, by selecting individual programs and files in your project and investigating them and determining the best way to analyze them. Later, when you have the tools and settings established, you can analyze the whole application in earnest.

6.2 Preparation

If you stopped following the tutorials, to experiment independently or to close down Revolve, start this tutorial as follows:

1. If Revolve Enterprise Edition is not running, restart it in the same way as before.

2. Open the Order project by selecting it from the recent files list at the bottom of the Project menu.

3. Check that your analysis tools settings and options are set correctly for the tutorials, as described in the Preparation section of the Finding Points of Interest chapter.

6.3 Customizing the Group Settings

The default settings for the analysis tools are supplied with Revolve. These settings are stored in a group called DEFAULTS.You can customize the settings and store your own versions of them in a group. You can then choose between your customized settings and the default settings.

1. If the Analysis Tools window isn't displayed, click Analysis Tools on the Enterprise menu.

2. Double-click Configuration wizard on Analysis Tools, read the wizard text and click Next when you are ready to move on to the next screen.

3. You need to create your own group of settings so that you can customize them, so click Create a new settings group.

4. Specify the name Order for your new group of settings, since these settings will apply to the Order project. These settings will be based on the only other group of settings, Defaults.

   Click OK and then click Next.

   All the analysis tools are listed and some are highlighted indicating that there are settings for these tools in the group on which your new settings will be based.

5. Click the Literals tool to deselect it. Deselecting a tool means that no settings will be defined for that tool.

6. Click Next. Click Yes when warned about deselecting tools.

7. The wizard now offers the settings dialogs for each selected tool in turn. You can see the tool's name in the title bar of the wizard. For each tool, keep or change the settings and click Next after each one, as follows:
   • For Names of data items, keep the existing defaults and import the Criteria.txt file as before, from \samples\enterprise\orderapp\other. These will now become part of your default settings for this Order project.

   • For Use of data items, remove two of the checks: SET UP/DOWN BY on the first page and Unused 01/77 items on the second page. From our knowledge of the Order project, we know that these constructs are never used and so removing them helps to speed up the tool.

8. Click Finish at the end of the wizard.

   The settings you specified are saved in the Order group of settings.

9. Click Yes when asked if you want to make these your current settings.

   Notice that the status bar at the bottom of Analysis Tools now shows Settings: Order.

10. Click OK.

11. Now double click the Use of data items tool you customized, to check that the new defaults are applied. Click Cancel afterwards, as you don't need to run the tool again.

The settings you have specified for these tools remain intact even if you close down the product.

6.4 Copying Settings to Another PC

If you are working in a group, you might all want to use the same settings, so that the results from your analysis are consistent and reproducible. If one user develops some improved settings, you might all want to adopt those settings.

Currently, the facilities for sharing settings are limited. However you can copy files from one user's PC to another.

This section describes how to copy customized settings to another PC.

1. Using Windows, go to the directory, config\enterprise\settings. This directory now contains two other directories:
   • Defaults. These are read-only and you cannot change them.

   • Order. This directory contains the customized settings that you created.

2. Copy the config\enterprise\settings\order directory structure to the other PCs, putting it under the directory config\enterprise\settings\order, so that it is in parallel with the Defaults subdirectory.

Now, if you look on the other PC and go to Settings on the Enterprise menu, the Order group of settings will be available.

6.5 Additional Settings Files

In some situations, you need both positive and negative settings for a tool. For example, you might want settings that find unwanted data items so that you can remove them from the worksheet, and you might want other settings that find genuine points of interest so that you can add them to the worksheet. You can create search criteria files for any tools that have an Import button, and then you can import the criteria when you run the tool.

This section describes how to create a file of search criteria for the Names of data items tool.

1. Using a text editor, such as Notepad, open the file \samples\enterprise\orderapp\other\criteria.txt. This is the supplied search criteria file for the Names of data items tool.

   Notice that each setting is typed exactly as it would be in the dialog for the analysis tool, except that case is not significant.

2. Remove all the existing non-monetary names and add some monetary names. As an example, type: *price*, *cost*, and *value*. Case is unimportant. Each name must be on a separate line.

3. Save this file as a different file, so you keep the original. Save this as Criteria-money.txt in the same directory as the original. You now have two search criteria files:
   • Criteria.txt - this is the original file and contains non-monetary data item names and is for finding false points of interest

   • Criteria-money.txt - this is the new file you have just created and contains monetary data items names and is for finding genuine points of interest

4. Close Notepad.

5. Run Names of data items, clear the existing names and import this new search criteria file.

   The resulting set contains 57 data items with monetary names. Notice that many of the items are gray indicating that they are already in the worksheet.

6. Close the Names of Data Items set.

You can store the search criteria files centrally, so that all the users in your group can use the file.

6.6 Capturing a Composite Tool

During your analysis, you might need to run the same sequence of tools on several different programs or sets. You can create a tool that mimics the way you produced a set manually, which might have involved running several analysis tools, subtracting or intersecting sets, and running further tools.

The new tool is known as a composite tool and comprises the sequence of tools together with their settings that you used manually. The new tool appears on the analysis tools list, from where you can run the new tool and automatically produce sets in the same way as the manually produced set.

This section explains how to capture the process used to generate the "Monetary constants" set, and to create a composite tool "Find monetary constants".

1. Double-click "Monetary constants" in the Named Sets window.

2. Right click the right-hand pane of the Set View, and click Create Tool.

3. In the Name field, type the name "Find monetary constants" for the new tool, and click OK.

4. In Analysis Tools, double click the new tool Find monetary constants, and click OK to run the tool.

   The resulting set contains 66 items, which is the same as the first time you produced this set manually. You might expect the number to be different because you changed the default settings with the Configuration wizard. However, a composite tool always adopts the settings used to produce the previously created set.

You now have a composite tool made from an audit trail, and you can run this tool on other programs to repeat exactly the same process.

6.7 Editing a Composite Tool

When you are developing a tool, you might need to change part of it without recreating it from scratch again, perhaps to adopt some new settings.

We recommend that you develop and refine tools using a small selection of source files before you go on to do the full analysis. The problem is that if you change a composite tool half way through your full analysis, your later audit trails will refer to the same tool as the earlier audit trails, but the settings will be different. This gives the potential for confusion.

This section shows how to edit the new tool Find monetary constants so that it uses the settings that you configured for the Names of data items tool, and to include an additional data item name.

1. Close any sets you have open from the previous section.

2. Right click the new composite tool Find monetary constants in Analysis Tools.

3. Click Properties.

4. Right click on the last instance of Names of data items.

5. Click Properties.

6. In Patterns, type *CODE*, then click Add.

7. Click OK.

8. Now run the new tool Find monetary constants in the same way as before.

   The resulting set has 51 entries, and not the 66 originally produced from this composite tool. The difference of 15 represents 6 data items with *code* in their names, and 9 statements that use those data items.

9. Close the new set of 51 items, since for the purposes of demonstration we don't need it.

6.8 Sharing Composite Tools

Once you have created a composite tool, you can share it with your colleagues. Each composite tool is stored in a file with a .ct extension. The location of the file is the \Enterprise subdirectory of the project directory by default, but this can change depending on the scope of use you specify for the tool. Composite tools are saved in a file only when you close the project.

Unless you are working in a group from a shared project directory, everyone needs to copy the composite tool files to their own project directory.

For further information on sharing composite tools, see the Revolve Enterprise Edition User's Guide and refer to the topic Distributing Settings Groups in the online help system.

6.9 Summary

In this session, you:

• Customized the group settings using the Configuration wizard

• Copied customized settings to other PCs

• Edited a settings file, so that you could share it

• Captured a composite tool by right-clicking the the history pane of a set view and clicking Create Tool

• Shared a collection of composite tools

• Edited a composite tool, using the Tool Composition Editor

6.10 Before Continuing

You can close Revolve, if you want to stop for now. You can then continue with the next tutorial some other time.

Populating the Worksheet

Refining the Worksheet