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Visual Expert Release History

Visual Expert 2021

Code Inspection Features GA

Visual Expert 2021 officially includes the new code inspection features set to improve the security and quality of your PowerBuilder, Oracle and SQL Server code.

Visual Expert scans your source code to automatically detect security vulnerabilities, bugs and maintainability issues.

Read the following articles to learn how to inspect your code with Visual Expert:

 

Visual Expert 2020

New Code Analysis features

New UI features

New Integration Features

Enhancements

Visual Expert 2019 R2

New Features

Enhancements

Visual Expert 2019

New Feature Set: Generate diagrams from your code

Visual Expert 2019 introduces a new feature set to visualize the design of your application with diagrams.

They are automatically generated in the UI, and synchronized with the code, to combine design-level and code-level visualization.

Several models available from the start, additional ones will come step by step:

A Diagram Editor is automatically installed with VE to Edit, Export and Share the diagrams generated by Visual Expert.

New feature set: Code Performance Analysis

  • Identify the slowest procedures or functions
  • Break-down the execution time of a procedure to pinpoint issues
  • Find the slowest SQLs in your code
  • Get the execution plan of a SQL query (for Oracle) (for SQL Server)
  • Analyze the performance of a chain of objects calling each others
  • Drill-down from object, to query and code-level

Code Review

Source Code Documentation

Enhancements

  • Improved treeview response for large volumes of code
  • New setting to select a specific parser for DB code embedded in PowerBuilder
  • Automatic shrink of the Repository database when unused space exceeds 20%
  • Dynamic references to datawindows now highlighted in the code
  • Stored Proc called: references to procedures highlighted in PowerBuilder code
  • Shared datawindow: improvements to visualize shared DW dependencies
  • Updated Oracle Connection screen and added SID field.
  • Added wait indicator on open/close and other VE events.

Visual Expert 2018 R2

Visual Expert 2018 R1

Support for Team Foundation Server (TFS)

You can now analyze source code stored in TFS.

Visual Expert for SQL Server (GA)

Visual Expert 2017 introduced a beta version of our SQL Server Code analyzers (see this post). The official version (GA) is now available with Visual Expert 2018.

Other features

  • Treeview: Compare references to an object, between 2 versions of your code

Code Comparison

  • Save “snapshots” of your code on a regular basis, and compare them anytime.
  • Run Comparison across both PowerBuilder and Database Code
  • Explore differences in a container hierarchy. Drill down to find relevant changes.
  • Filter changes for a given PBL, object, object type.
  • And more...

CRUD Matrix

Shows which program is accessing which data, and how (Create/Read/update/delete)
This feature scans all your Datawindows, PowerScript, Stored Procedures, views, etc.
Read more

New Code Analyzer for SQL Server (BETA VERSION)

Other features

 

New Features Visual Expert for Oracle

  • Treeview: SQL Performances - Columns with missing Index
  • Treeview: Code Review - Calculating the number of Lines of PL/SQL Code
  • Treeview: Code Review - Counting PL/SQL Items by type
  • Treeview: SQL Performances - Tables with missing Primary Key
  • Treeview: SQL Performances - Unused Indexes
  • Treeview: Code Review - Find Uncommented PL/SQL scripts
  • Treeview: Code Review - Large PL/SQL scripts
  • Treeview: Code Review - Find empty PL/SQL functions/procedures
  • Treeview: Code Review - Find duplicated functions/procedures

New Features Visual Expert for PowerBuilder

Improvements

  • Treeview feature/PB: Finding "Unused" items now extended to PBL Root and PB Application level
  • Treeview feature/PB: "Overrides" (methods replacing ancestor scripts) now extended to PBLs and Application level
  • Impact Analysis now indicates the type of access to tables & columns (Select/Insert/Update/Delete)
  • VE GUI: New indicator on tables & columns (red spot) when their declaration is included in the project
  • VE GUI: Selecting a table or column in the treeview now highlights their declaration in the code

Visual Expert 2015 is end-of-life. Learn more

New Features

  • Treeview feature/PB: List Computed Fields of selected Datawindows
  • Treeview feature/PB: PBL level dependencies (External References / PBL dependencies)
  • Treeview feature/PB: Large PBLs (Code Review)
  • Treeview feature/PB: Find all the Dll functions declared in a PowerBuilder application
  • Source Code Documentation: Home page, objects lists, new sections and hyperlinks added
  • VE GUI: Macro parameters can be saved and applied automatically next time
  • VE Project management: Review the history of code analyses
  • VE Project management: Delete past code analyses to free up disk space
  • VE Project management: Access Control features, secure VE projects shared between teammates
  • New Macros: Empty Methods
  • New Macros: Object Metrics
  • New Macros: Functions Metrics Summary
  • New Macros: Retrieve SQL
  • New Macro - DW Exploration - Retrieve Arguments (5.7), Controls containing (5.7) Compute Fields

Improvements

Visual Expert Featured Resources


Videos