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Welcome to Micro Focus SmartFind Plus. This product provides a complete environment and range of tools for analyzing COBOL applications and investigating the year 2000 issues.
SmartFind Plus comprises the underlying Revolve software and its database, and a range of integrated year-2000 tools specifically designed for year 2000 verification and remediation. Optionally, Revolve can include extensions for additional languages, such as PL/I.
Apart from this Getting Started book, all the documentation is online only. You get to it from the Windows Start menu, or from SmartFind Plus's Help menu. This Getting Started book is both online and in printed book form. All necessary instructions for installing SmartFind Plus are displayed by the installation utility, Setup.
Let's start with a brief description of the major parts of SmartFind Plus. Once you are familiar with these you will be ready to start using SmartFind Plus. The chapters from Start Here for the Tutorials onward are a set of tutorials that take you through all the major parts of the product, process and software.
SmartFind Plus comprises:
You can use SmartFind Plus for finding and fixing the points in the code that might cause logic problems when processing dates. You can also use SmartFind Plus for verifying that an application has already been remediated is actually year 2000 compliant. Alternatively, you can use the Revolve/2000 tool, which is for finding data items that might refer to dates.
First, you find the date issues using the analysis tool Verify - all research. This tool finds all the data items that are potentially dates and then focuses on how those date data items are used. For example, comparing two date data items across the century boundary can cause a logic error, but moving one date data item to another does not. The tool puts all the date issues into a worksheet, and categorizes each one on why it is a potential issue.
Second, you analyze each issue in the worksheet to understand it fully, recording any decisions and comments, as you work. You categorize the issues according to whether or not they are genuinely issues and what sort of issues they are. You also ensure that the date formats of the date data items are correctly recorded. In SmartFind Plus these date formats are known as year types.
Next, you produce reports on your findings, including audit trails as appropriate.
Finally, if you intend to fix the application, you use SmartFix to automatically generate code that fixes the problems. You then check and adjust the fix code if necessary, and finally insert the fix code into a copy of your sources.
Revolve/2000 tool finds data items that might refer to dates by examining the data item names. For example, a data item with the word DATE in the name might be captured. You can then trace these date data items through the application using Impact Analysis to uncover any associated data items.
The central component of SmartFind Plus is a project database containing a complete representation of an application's source code. The database represents not only the content of your application but also its structure. The database can handle many different types of source code, including COBOL, JCL, BMS and so on. When you load the source into the database, it is parsed, checking for inconsistencies, misnamed components and so on. Once the database is loaded, any analysis you do operates on the database. When you need to work on the actual source files, you can display them in context and amend them if required, although this is not recommended in the year 2000 context.
The underlying Revolve software provides the graphical environment and the tools for analyzing applications, for exploring elements of the code, and for viewing the code graphically. The tools include an integrated editor for viewing code while analyzing it, a syntax checker, and browsers, which enable you to explore the source code and quickly refer to where objects are used throughout an entire system. For example, the Variables browser shows all the places where a variable is referenced or modified in the source code.
Revolve supplements its base support for COBOL with specific language extensions for Assembler, PL/I and Unisys systems. Each extension provides a language parser that identifies individual components of an application system, such as programs, copy or include files, variables, job steps, data files and so on. The parser then adds these components to the Revolve database.
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