Introduction |
Understand's GUI is broken into two main areas, the Project Window and the Document Window. The Project Window, which can be hidden or shown, provides a quick way to find entities and information about them.
The Document Window is where source files, graphical views and a variety of other browsers and windows are displayed.
The Document Area is where source files, graphical views and a variety of other browsers and windows are displayed, including:
· Graphical Hierarchy BrowsersThe Project Window is further divided into two areas, the Filter Area and the Information Browser.
The Filter Area provides a quick list of entities of each kind shown in the selected Filter Area Tab. Options are Files, Subprograms, Tasks, Packages, Types, Global Objects, Root Withs, Root Decls, Root Calls, and Root Callbys. In each of these any entity that has been declared (or used) in the source code can quickly be found.
Note the tabs above beginning with "Root", as in Root Decls or Root Withs. "Root" tabs filter entities to only what is on the top of a given tree. The tops (or bottoms) of relationship trees are often helpful points to being exploration of code new or unknown to you.
· Root Decls - list only the highest level declaring routines.Because there can be a lot of tabs, you also have the option of showing the Filter Area options as a Pulldown menu:
The default uses Tabs, change this setting in the Options->Preferences Dialog, General Tab.
Any time you left click on an item in the Filter Area the Information Browser updates to show everything that Understand for Ada knows about that entity. The Information Browser shows this data as a tree which whose branches can be expanded individually or in bulk.
There is always an Information Browser in the Project Window. In addition, by holding down the CTRL key while right clicking and choosing View Information, new Information Browser windows can be displayed in the Document Area.
All information in an Information Browser window can be saved to a text file, or copied and pasted via standard Windows or X11 copying functions.
For more details on using the Information Browser, refer to Information Browser.
Not all entities fall into one of the tab categories shown in the Filter Area. I
In past versions of Understand for Ada the Locator Window was the initial startup window that appeared when you start Understand for Ada. In the newer versions it is opened via the Search menu on the menubar. It has a filterable list of entities in the database. You may filter by name, by entity type, or by a kind of relationship (e.g. invocation, with, callby, etc...). You may also filter by looking at entities at the top of a given relationship tree (e.g. top of With Tree).
The purpose of the Locator Window is to help you find entities and/or views that you want to learn more about. The Locator Window is opened via the Search->Locate Entities or Search->Browse Entities menu on the main menubar.
Similar to the Unix command grep, you may search the project files or another selection of files for the occurence of a text string or regular expression. Matches are shown in the Search Results window and can be visited in the source code by double-clicking on any line.
For more details on using Hyper Grep, refer to Using Hyper Grep to Find Things.
The Hierarchy Browser shows multiple level relationships between entities. All relationships are multi-level and are shown to the top or bottom of their respective tree unless a level option is set in the browser.
Understand for Ada offers information about these relationships:
- Callby - view of who calls a given entity
Following is an example of a Withby view::
Declaration views offer a one glance way to see important structure and relational information about a given entity. Understand for Ada offers these declaration views:
- File Declaration - shows what compilation units are defined within a given declaration
Following is an example of a package declaration:
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