Explode

This option allows you to pick an application, process type, and process name, and instantly see all the optional and automatic children that process calls. You can point this at the main menu for an application, and drill down through all the menu choices, the JOBS they call, the children the JOBS call, the automatic/optional children they call, etc, etc. Since we only look at one process at a time, response is practically instantaneous. This has mostly been superseded by the functionality in Hyperlink Process View (see below), but this option does allow you to print a complete indented map of your application, which the Hyperlink Process View does not.


Find Unused

This quickly gives you a list of all the processes that are not used at all in your application. You could get the same information from the APPX Cross Reference, except you would have to run it for all processes, and then wade through the printout looking for '* Not Referenced *', but that is time consuming and prone to error.

Unlike the APPX cross reference, this utility allows you to scan other applications in the same version to check for references. This option also checks the APPX System Administration files to ensure a process is not set up as a users start up process or Direct Menu.


View by PCF

How many times have you been looking for that particular INPUT process that used the 'fill_in_the_blank' file as it's PCF? You know that somebody wrote it, but you can't remember what they called it, so you have to review all the INPUTS to find the one you need. This utility scans the Processes and shows you all the processes (including INPUTS, OUTPUTS, UPDATES, etc) sorted by the PCF file name. The Hyperlink Process View does this as well, except it also cross references the entire application. This utility is much quicker.

This has been superseded somewhat by the Dynamic Indexes feature in APPX 3.5+, which allows you to resequence the list of processes by PCF name, but this utility crosses process type boundaries, so you would see all the INPUTs, OUTPUTs, UPDATEs, etc, that use a particular file as their PCF.

From the list of processes, you can use the "Jump to Process" button to jump to the selected process in Application Design.


Hyperlink View

This is similar to the Explode option above, except we build an internal 'map' of the process references so that we can quickly see the parents of a particular process, in addition to its child processes. When you run this option, you specify the primary application and version, and the system shows you a list of the other applications in the same version. You can then choose to include those applications as well.


Since we used recursive programming techniques, there aren't any limits as to how far you can go up or down the process tree, except for possibly main memory limitations.

Once the internal cross reference is built, you can instantly see what processes call other processes, even across application boundaries. A common situation is where you want to find out if a particular process is used or not. With the APPX utilities, you would run the normal cross reference, and it might tell you the process is called by another process of the same type (i.e. the OUTPUT CUSTOMER LIST 2 is called by CUSTOMER LIST). Now you have to run another cross reference on that process, and APPX might tell you that process is called by a JOB. You do one more cross reference, and APPX finally tells you that the JOB is not used. In the same length of time it takes APPX to do one cross reference, the Hyperlink view would have built all the references, and you could have determined the process was not used in a few seconds.


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