Rule-Based Analysis

Note:
  • Rule-based analysis is only available for local and remote native COBOL projects on Windows platforms only. It is not supported for programs opened using the Application Workflow Modeller.

Visual COBOL provides a variety of analysis queries (rules) that you can execute on individual COBOL programs or on an entire project to gain statistics to help improve the productivity.

Code analysis queries are referred to as rules and groups of rules are referred to as rule sets. In the IDE, you can run code analysis on individual COBOL programs or an entire project by executing a rule or an entire rule set on them. You can also enable code analysis to run each time a project is built.

Outside of the IDE, you can run code analysis when building projects using MSBuild at the command line (in Visual Studio) or using Ant targets (in Eclipse). This enables you to include code analysis in your continuous integration (CI) processes.

Visual COBOL comes with a set of rules and rule sets that include some of the most-commonly used analysis queries. These are generally organized in the following categories:

In addition to the rules supplied with the installation, you can import more rules and rule sets into Visual COBOL. Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer includes many more standard rules which you can reuse within the Visual COBOL and this gives you the option to be able to customize these to create your own site-specific analyst functions which you can then publish out to your development teams. Contact Micro Focus for further information.