Introducing the New Plugin Manager

Understand 7.0 introduces a powerful new Plugin Manager that simplifies customization and extends your code analysis workflow. Now, dozens of plugins ship with Understand, providing instant access to a wealth of pre-built functionality.

What are Plugins?

Plugins are extensions that add new features and capabilities to Understand. They can provide custom reports, metrics, architectures, graphs, and more. Plugins have been available on our public github repository, but always needed to be searched separately and installed manually. With the new Plugin Manager, it's easier than ever to browse, enable, and disable these plugins to tailor Understand to your specific needs.

Accessing the Plugin Manager

You can find the Plugin Manager under the Tools menu in Understand 7.0. You can also access it from the shortcut on the Home screen.

Exploring Plugins

The Plugin Manager presents a user-friendly interface for exploring available plugins. Each plugin entry includes A brief explanation of the plugin's functionality, where applicable, an example of the plugin's output or usage and a toggle to activate or deactivate the plugin. There is also an option to Customize the plugin which will let you edit a copy of the plugin using our API.

Plugin Categories

Plugins are categorized for easy navigation. Current categories include:

  • Reports: Generate custom reports tailored to specific coding standards or project requirements. Examples include code complexity reports, coding standard compliance reports, and code duplication reports.
  • Metrics: Calculate and display a wide range of code metrics. Examples include cyclomatic complexity variants, git-based analytics, and the Halstead Maintainability index.
  • Automatic Architectures:  Visualize high-level code structure and dependencies using your own code restructuring paradigm. Organize code by Copyright and License, when it was last modified, how stable it is, by entry points or any other way you can imagine
  • Graphs: Explore code relationships with various graph visualizations. Examples include custom control flow graphs, data flow graphs, and critical path comparisons graphs.

Benefits of Using Plugins

  • Enhanced Customization: Adapt Understand to your specific workflow and preferences.
  • Increased Productivity: Streamline common tasks with pre-built plugins.
  • Improved Code Quality:  Identify potential issues and improve code maintainability using specialized analysis plugins.
  • Simplified Access: Explore and utilize a vast library of plugins without separate installations.

With the new Plugin Manager in Understand 7.0, you have more power than ever to customize your code analysis workflow and gain deeper insights into your software.