Reports

The Reports menu contains items which help us generate reports (list of program elements that share some kind of property). Although the results of these reports are not charts, they also appear in the right panel. We can access two different menu items: Changes... and SourceAudit.... Let us walk through these two options.

• By pressing one if the submenus of the Changes... menu we get a new window in the center of the screen. The submenus are labeled Global changes and Sub-tree changes. In case of Global changes the search will consider the whole analyzed source, while in case of Sub-tree changes the search will only reach the children items of the currently selected program element in the Left Panel. Basicly this option of the Monitor allows us to search for the changes in the metric values of different program elements by giving a wide range of options to set as the conditions of the search. Let us see what these options are.
  In the top left section of the window we can choose the kind of changes that should be presented. There can be New elements - which were not present at the time of the last analysis, there can also be Removed elements - which have been deleted from the source since the last analysis and, most importantly, there might be parts of the source code which Changed in one or more of their metric values. Here we can also set the Maximum number of items we would like to search for (note that the highest number we can give here is 1000, otherwise we will get a warning).

  Still on the left side of the window there is a group of checkboxes labeled Filter. Here we can set the kinds of program elements to be included in the search (note that some of the boxes can be disabled if they do not share any of the metrics selected on the right side). We can choose to include namespaces, classes, structs, methods, etc.

  On the bottom left part of the window we can select the Layout of the results. The Tree view layout will present the data in a form of a tree with the possibility to open its branches.

  On the right side of the window we can select the metrics that we would like to check for changes. This means that if we select only one metric, only the program elements that had a change in this metric value will be part of the result. If we select more than one metrics, the results will contain parts of the code in which at least one of these metrics has changed. The metric groups are presented in a tree view and the different branches can be opened by left clicking on the small sign beside the check box of the metric group (for a detailed description of the metrics please refer to Appendixes A-D).

  Under the metrics box there are two radio buttons. Here we can select if we would like to treat the metric values in a regular fashion - Regular or we would like to divide each metric value by the logical lines of code value of the same program element - Relative to size (divided by lLOC). This second option normalizes the metric values with the size of the element.

  When we have set all the options in the desired way, we can push the OK button to perform the search. We can close the window by pressing the Cancel button.

• The other menu item we can access is labeled SourceAudit.... Choosing this option we get a similar window to the previous menu. The basic idea about this window is to be able to get the result of the bad smells and rule violations found in the system (for a detailed description of these metrics please refer to Appendixes B-D). On the left side we can select the Maximum number of items, set a Filter and a Layout in the same way as before. Still on the right side we can choose the Bad smells and Rule violations to be included in our query. If you are not familiar with all these settings, please read the description of the Changes... menu above.