Inventory process for software assets

During the inventory process for software assets, Rational® Asset Analyzer scans the assets that you specify, and then stores information about them in a DB2® database. Later, when you use Rational Asset Analyzer to assess the impact of a proposed change or to build information about certain connectors, the product uses the stored information about your assets.

Begin image description. This image shows the basic flow for inventory collection for MVS assets. End image description.

You can take an inventory on certain kinds of source files and database files:

Source code: COBOL, PL/I, assembler, and JCL
SQL statements (DCLCURSOR, DCLTABLE, DELETE, FETCH, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE)
CICS® online regions and transactions
IMS subsystems and transactions
DB2 catalogs (columns, stored procedures, systems, tables, and views)
JEE assets (EAR, WAR, JAR, Java™ bytecode, etc.)

In the first stage of the inventory process, the product identifies the type of each file and assigns known analyzers for further processing, designating other types and languages of files as unknown.

Rational Asset Analyzer also checks that the necessary files are available to complete includes that are made. If additional files are needed, you can specify them as concatenation sets.

After you have specified the files that you want or need to include in the inventory, Rational Asset Analyzer completes the inventory process and populates the database with this information.

The inventory is a snapshot of the data about a source, not a copy of the source itself. You need to rescan the assets if you want Rational Asset Analyzer to know about changes in them.

Inventory for distributed assets

When you take an inventory of distributed assets, analyzers identify, analyze, and classify assets such as Java bytecode classes and HTML files and then store information about these assets in a database. The Rational Asset Analyzer scanner finds distributed assets on file systems, including local and remote Windows file systems and AIX® file systems mapped to the Windows server through SAMBA and Fast Connect.

Rational Asset Analyzer provides over 40 analyzers that understand the structure and contents of distributed assets, including Java bytecode, C++, JavaServer Pages (JSP) files, HTML, and XML. These domain-specific analyzers examine the structure of physical assets (such as files) and logical assets (such as Java classes) to determine the following information:

Resource-specific semantic attributes
Textual information
Keywords and relations among the assets

The bytecode analyzer, for example, extracts semantic features like class name, fields and methods defined, and incoming and outgoing references from Java assets. It stores these features in attributes (called fields), such as the package attribute, so that you can query for classes that are part of a specific Java package (for example, the com.ibm.analyzer package).

After the structure and contents of assets have been analyzed, the assets are organized into categories such as containers, Java assets, or Web assets. Users can explore the categories to discover what is available in the enterprise server and to find reuse candidates and code examples that are relevant to their work.