Cobol Variable Usage

The Cobol Variable Usage tab shows variable usage in COBOL programs and also in User-Defined Functions (that are currently treated as COBOL programs), identifies the variables that are declared in COBOL Copybooks/INCLUDES, and displays the Include names within ( ) brackets. The variables that are defined in the program source will not have the ( ) brackets.

Important: In AD Analyze Client, when encountering Conditional Compilation directives (>>IF or >>EVALUATE), only the code that belongs to the first branch will be considered and displayed in the analysis. Compilation directives are not directly displayed in AD Analyze, but they might impact the analysis results.

To display the Cobol Variable Usage tab, go to Explore Projects tab and select Cobol Variable Usage from the Usage in Programs list of analyses to the right of the screen.

The central part of the screen displays the list of attribute filters. The breadcrumb displays the selected projects, the selected attributes together with the filters set for each attribute.

Click the Filter field to the right of an attribute name and enter the filter that you want to use for the attributes' names. After you press Apply, only the elements that match the name filter are displayed in the Results area. Special characters can be used. For example:
  • "*" is used to search elements, by adding to it either prefixes or suffixes as in "AAA*" or "*AAA"
  • "," is used to search multiple elements as in "AAA, BBB, CCC"
Note: The special characters "*" and "," cannot be used simultaneously.

To limit the number of attributes of a certain type that are returned by the filtering operation, use the fields in the Limit column. The default limit is 10; the maximum limit can be set in the corresponding Usage Settings section from the Preferences dialog. For more information, see Cobol Variable Usage Settings. The Context column displays the context of the filter operation where relevant. To the right of Attribute filters area, the list of projects is displayed.

Use Save to save the current filter configuration. Use Load to load a previously saved filter configuration.

By default, Enable levels limit is selected and the number of elements which are presented in the Results area is limited by the values set in the Limit column. If you deselect this option, the Limit column from the Attribute filters area disappears and the Results area displays all the results of the analysis. Press Apply to apply the selected filters. When the filtering operation is finished, you can use the black arrow button in the upper left corner of Attribute filters area to hide it and maximize the Results area. To see the Cobol Variable Usage parameters in a separate tab, use the arrow button in the top right corner of Cobol Variable Usage tab.

The results of the filtering operation are displayed in the Results area. Use the search field to locate a specific element in the Results tree. Click the adjacent button find only annotated to filter the search results so that only the annotated elements are shown. In the upper right corner of the Results area, the following buttons are available:

Expand top 2 levels, click this button to expand the top two levels of the tree.

Collapse all, click this button to fold all the tree branches.

Export Results to CSV File, use this button to export the results together with the used filter configuration.

Place the mouse cursor over a node in the tree to display a tooltip presenting the element category and name. When you select a tree node, the area to the right of the screen is updated to display the graphs, reports, and usage analyses that can be generated for the selected element. Also, the Properties view displays the information available for the selected element.

In the tree, double-click a variable to open the corresponding file at the occurrence line. The following nodes are available:
Table 1. Cobol Variable Usage Tab nodes
Node name Description
COBOL file Lists the tree for a COBOL source file that contains nodes for variables.
Variables Lists all the variables in the COBOL file.

Cobol Variable Usage pop-up menu

Select a node from the tree in the Results area then right-click to display the pop-up menu. The number of options available depends on the type of node selected. View analysis source and Copy options are available for all nodes. According to the selected node, several Collapse to … Level options might also be available.