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Visual Expert Update List

Visual Expert 2020

New features

New UI features

  • Source Code view: you can now export the script or object displayed
  • Ribbon Menu: New tab page “Cross References”
  • New dashboard to guide users a startup (when no project is opened)
  • Guided Tour: interactive animation to introduce VE to beginners
  • Source code view: you can now Zoom in / Zoom out to adjust the size of the code

Enhancements

  • CRUD Matrix: support for synonyms, now listed in the columns of the CRUD matrix like tables. User can visualize references to each object separately (table or synonym).
  • VE Sample Projects: now add DB synonyms examples
  • Code Review Report: now includes Naming Convention verification
  • Source Code view: when printing a script, its path is now included
  • Source Code view: tooltips now show the path of the procedures referenced
  • Ribbon Menu: tooltips added for all Ribbon controls 
  • Connection to Oracle: connection settings improved
  • System Resources: if Video RAM is too low, a warning is now displayed

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 queries accessing a table
  • Generate the execution plan of a query to identify optimizations
  • Analyze the performance of a chain of objects calling each others
  • Drill-down from object, to query and code-level

Code Review

  • New Code Review HTML Report. This report checks some development rules for SQL Server, Oracle and PowerBuilder applications, and lists the encountered issues in an html document.
  • New macro to check naming conventions for SQL Server code.

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

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

How to
Videos