SciTools Support

Overview

CodeCheck scripts are special Perl and Python scripts that let you provide custom checks for verifying your team’s coding standards.
They can be used to verify naming guidelines, metric requirements, published best practices, or any other rules or conventions that are important for your team.

These scripts are developed using the Understand Perl and Python API’s along with a set of special functions designed to interact with the Understand CodeCheck interface.

What Type of Checks Can I Write?

With Understand we’ve taken a different approach to static analysis than a lot of other tools and that is also reflected in CodeCheck. Most other static analysis tools focus on identifying bugs, CodeCheck is more focused on analyzing coding standards. For that reason many of our customers use Understand in addition to other static analysis tools.

Here are some of the things it does well:

• Verify coding style guidelines are met:
• Naming Conventions
• Spacing Conventions
• Required Comment styles
• Specified styles for specific code constructs
• Metric Thresholds
• Line & Statement Counting
• Complexity
• Comment/Code ratio
• Object Coupling
• Readability
• Find required or unnecessary constructs
• Identify required or forbidden calls to libraries or functions

And here are some areas it’s not so good at:

• Memory allocation/leaks
• Tracking data/variables between functions
• Anything that requires expression analysis
• Type casting/conversions
• Identifying arithmetic and floating point issues

Script Locations

Codecheck has several directories it checks for scripts:

• C:\Program Files\SciTools\conf\plugin\SciTools\Codecheck
• C:\Program Files\SciTools\conf\plugin\User\CodeCheck
• C:\Users\USERID\AppData\Roaming\SciTools\plugin\Codecheck
• MacOSX users: ~/Library/Application Support/SciTools/plugin/User/Custom/ Note that the /plugin/User/Custom/ directories will need to be created.

The first location gets overwritten with a new install of Understand so don’t save any changes to that directory, but it’s a good place to look for examples of existing checks.

Write Your First Custom Check

The first part of writing your own Codecheck script is becoming familiar with the API by going through the API Tutorials. Next, to write your own check, start by navigating to the appropriate template file in

conf/plugin/User/codecheck/codecheck_template.upl (for a Perl script) or
conf/plugin/User/codecheck/codecheck_template.upy (for a Python script)

Save the template file to the Understand installation directory under conf/plugin/User/codecheck/myscript.upl (or myscript.upy) and open the file in a text Editor or in Understand.

Modify the name, unique identifier, description and detailed_description subroutines to reflect our test.

This is what it will look like in Perl:

sub name { return "Files start with Letters";}

sub checkID { return "CUST01";}

sub description { return "Verify that all files start with a letter.";}

sub detailed_description { return "Company coding standards specify ". 
"that file names should start with letters.";}

def name():
	return 'Files start with Letters'

def id():
	return 'CUST01'

def description():
	return 'Verify that all files start with a letter.'

def detailed_description():
	return """\
Company coding standards specify that 
file names should start with letters."""

if ($file->name =~ /^[^a-zA-Z]/) {
	$check->violation(0, $file, -1, -1, "File name does not begin with a letter");
}

if re.search("^[a-zA-Z]", file.name()):
	check.violation(file, file, -1, -1,"File name does not begin with a letter")