One important piece of using Understand is being able to create an accurate project that will provide you with all of the accurate details needed when using Understand. There are quite a few ways to get an accurate project and they are covered here. The fastest and easiest ways to create an accurate project usually come from using Visual Studio, GCC/G++, or CMake, and if those aren’t options for you then manually setting all includes and macros, and configuring overrides have been your next option. We have just introduced a new technology (beta) in Understand that will help out Windows and Linux users that don’t have the previously mentioned options available to them. This new technology will “watch” your build run and use the information it gathers to create a complete Understand project. Keep reading to see how to use this new feature and let us know any feedback that you have on it. Note that this will not work when a project is built inside Visual Studios and we suggest using the VS import option as the best way to get an accurate Understand project for VS projects.
Launch Understand and select File->New->Project. Add the directory where your source code is located and continue so Understand can provide you with the best options for creating your project. If you have any of the aforementioned options that are obvious to Understand then they will be the first options provided to you (ie., Visual Studio project, .json file, etc.). If you don’t want to use these then select the option to ‘Skip’, or if you don’t have any available, then the next screen will look like this:
Select the option, “Yes, watch me build my C/C++ project”. The next step is to clean your build so that Understand can ‘watch’ the entire build process. After that is complete, go back to Understand and select “Continue, my build system is in a clean state”
and then start your build. Understand will display the files as it finds them and when the build is complete select ‘Finished’ in Understand and then ‘Stop watching, the build is complete’.
For a visual guide on creating a new project from source, watch this video:
Or, watch this video to see how to create a new Visual Studio project:
If you have a project that builds with CMake, here’s how to set it up in Understand:
Do you have any files in your project with custom extensions? You can configure your project to recognize and thus accurately analyze those files. Watch the short video below to see how:
That’s it, you should now have all of the necessary files that Understand needs for an accurate project. Run a complete analysis and you are ready to go.
We appreciate any feedback that you have, just send it to support@scitools.com