Enhanced Code Inspection

Visual Expert scans your code to detect Security Vulnerabilities, Bugs, and Maintainability Issues.

  • Hard coded user id & passwords, IP addresses.
  • Vulnerabilities to Injections attacks
  • Fields access/protection issues
  • Improper/unsecured use of encryption
  • and more...

The new Interactive Dashboard make it even easier to find and fix issues in your code.

Extended Impact Analysis

Visual Expert discovers the relationships between PB and DB objects so you know which elements will be impacted by a change.

Visual Expert 2022 extends the scope of fine-grained analyses by supporting new sources of code:

  • PowerBuilder 2021,
  • Oracle Cloud Database,
  • SQL Server Azure,
  • PBG files...
Impact Analysis in PowerBuilder and DB Code

Recently added features:

Security Vulnerabily

Security Scan

Detect vulnerabilities

Automatically scan the code to detect vulnerabilities that could be exploited to steal data or hijack the application's functionalities.

Visual Expert Code Documentation

New Documentation

Generate HTML reference manuals

Schedule and automatically document the references in your code. Navigate between them using hyperlinks. Share knowledge

Visual Expert Code Documentation

Call Tree Diagram

Visualize objects references

Document the inner workings, Track the flow of values between procedures, Detect anomalies of program execution, etc.

Continuous Code Inspection with Visual Expert and Jenkins

Jenkins Plugin

Continuous Code Inspection

  • Integrate VE in a CI workflow to analyze, inspect, and document your code automatically with Jenkins
Object Dependency Matrix

Object Dependency Matrix

Generate an ODM

  • Review references between Oracle, SQL Server & PB objects
Inventory of source code

Inventory of Source Code

Estimate the volume of your code

  • For auditing purposes or workload assessment: lines of code, count of PB & DB objects by type...

Visual Expert Features

200+ features to analyze and improve your PowerBuilder, Oracle and SQL Server code

Impact Analysis

Assess the impact of a change in your code

Estimate what you should modify to accomplish a change.
Don't break your application after a change!

  • If I change this variable, what is the effect on my code?
  • If I add a parameter to a function, what else is affected?
  • If a table or column is changed, which code should I update?

Scan for Security Vulnerabilities

Identify and fix Security issues in your code:

  • Hard coded user id & passwords 
  • Hard coded IP addresses.
  • Vulnerabilities to Injections attacks
  • Fields access/protection issues
  • Improper/unsecured use of encryption
  • and more...

Check rules for Code Security

Review CRUD Operations in Your code
(Create, Read, Update, Delete)

Generate a CRUD matrix showing which programs access your data.

For instance, which DW or Procedures Create/Read/Update/Delete which Tables.

  • Review dependencies between database and PB applications.
  • Analyze the impact of changing your database Schema, for example changing a table definition or adding an index.
  • Estimate software complexity and development efforts.
  • Find out which table is never updated, deleted from multiple places, etc.
  • Make sure every process has at least one input (R) and one output (CUD).

Generate Diagrams from your Code 

  • Visualize objects and dependencies.
  • Diagrams and source code are synchronized.
  • Select objects to generate a diagram

Visual Expert generates:

  • Data Model Diagram to document graphically database entities and their relationships. 
  • Impact Analysis Diagrams to find all references to a table, column, object, method, variable...
  • Call graphs to visualize chains of calls (multiple levels of references).
  • PBL dependency diagrams to visualize dependencies between PBLs


Visualize your code with diagrams

Explore Complex Chains of Calls

Display Call Trees: callers and callees for Functions and events.

Explore all possible execution paths.
Drill down in the code, click on referenced methods or variables to see their definitions.

Call trees help evaluate the effects of modifications to your code.

Visual Expert Call Trees

Document your Code

Create reference manuals in HTML

Update your documentation on a regular basis (scheduled job).
Document the references in your code and navigate between these using hyperlinks.
Share knowledge with teammates.

 

Improve Code Quality

Cleanup the code. Streamline maintenance efforts. Avoid unexpected behavior.

  • Identify unused objects and remove some dead code.
  • Find empty methods, duplicated objects, oversized or uncommented scripts.
  • Calculate code metrics: lines of code, number of objects, methods, variables…
  • Check naming conventions.
  • Find objects that do not inherit from an ancestor etc.
  • You can check your code against hundreds of rules

Improve Code Performance

Find slow pieces of code. Remove Bottlenecks

  • Find the slowest procedures, functions, triggers
  • Reduce the time to access a given table
  • Break down the execution time of a large object into sub-queries or instructions.
  • Decompose the performance of a chain of calls
Identify Performance Issues in your DB Code

Code Comparison

Compare 2 versions of your DB or application:

  • View differences in a container hierarchy.
  • Drill down to find relevant changes.
  • Filter changes for a given object, or object type: Userobject, Table, Procedure...
  • Filter changes in a given PBL.
  • Save “snapshots” of your code on a regular basis, and compare them anytime.
  • And more...

Understand Complex Code

Explore the application structure. Understand its inner working.

When maintaining complex Applications, you may need to learn more about the code.
In such cases, Visual Expert is the perfect companion for PowerBuilder.

Navigate in your code via hyperlinks: each reference comes with a link to the referenced item.
Tooltips provide useful information about objects, methods and variables.
Explore inheritance dependencies between PB objects.
Lots of advanced feature will screen your code under various angles.

Catch a glimpse of Visual Expert

How it works?

Visual Expert Working

Read more

Visual Expert Pricing & Editions

Feedback from our clients