SciTools Support

This article is part of a series on using the Understand API.

Understand has an extensive API to let you query the data it captures about your code. The Python and Perl APIs are the most robust and allow interaction with the Understand GUI. The C and Java APIs have fewer features and require additional setup. All four APIs are read-only, they do not modify the Understand project. If you need to do that programmatically, take a look at ‘und’.

Opening An Understand Project

Let’s start by taking a look at a very simple Perl API script.

sample.pl

use Understand;
$db = Understand::open("c:\projects\test.und");
foreach $file ($db->ents("file")) {
	print $file->longname(),"\n";
}

The first line tells the Perl interpreter that you want to use the Understand API library. It then opens an Understand project file (c:\projectstest.und) and iterates through a list of each of the file entities in that project and prints the name of each file on a separate line.

To run this yourself, change the path to point to one of your own projects. Note that for Windows paths you need to escape the slashes by doubling them.

Uperl is a perl interpreter that is included with Understand in the bin\system directory. To run this script, open the command line/terminal and run:

cd "c:\program files\scitools\bin\pc-win64"

or the appropriate path on your system, then

uperl.exe myscript.pl

import understand
db = understand.open("c:\projects\test.und")
for file in db.ents("file"):
	print(file.longname())

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include "C:\Program Files\SciTools\src\udb\udb.h"
static char *dbFilename = "c:\projects\test.und";
main ( int argc, char *argv[]) {
	UdbStatus status = udbDbOpen(dbFilename);
	UdbEntity *ents;
	int entsSize;
	int i;
	udbListEntity("file", &ents, &entsSize);
	for (i=0; i<entsSize; i++) {
		printf ("%s\n", udbEntityNameLong(ents[i]));
	}
	udbListEntityFree(ents);
	udbDbClose();
}

sample.exe : sample.obj