The RainCode Roadmap is a RainCode product, which produces documentation out of possibly large amounts of source code automatically, in order to ease maintenance, and, more generally, deliver usable knowledge about existing systems.

In order to make this generated documentation as widely available as possible, the RainCode Roadmap produces HTML pages that can be viewed with any reasonably compliant web browser. This allows the generated documentation to be published on an intranet or on the Internet.

The deliverables

The RainCode Roadmap produces several pieces of information in these HTML pages:

• The source code. Each module is rendered in HTML form, lines can be numbered, colour codes are used to emphasize various parts (SQL statements, comments, etc.) and hypertext tags are used to navigate comfortably in the source file, going from a variable usage to the matching definition, etc.
  
  
• Cross-references. Global resources are listed together with the places where they are used, across the entire portfolio. Such global resources include SQL tables, queues, copybooks (or INCLUDE's, depending on the programming language at hand), etc.
  
  
• Metrics. A number of commonly used metrics are gathered, and reported, in tabular as well as in graphical form. These graphics are generated statically by the RainCode Roadmap itself. There is no need for any dynamic component, for instance, a business graphic engine, to be integrated in the resulting documentation.

The Wizard

Setting up a complete Roadmap environment, to deal with thousands of modules, dozens of groups, is not a trivial undertaking. It requires complex configurations, automated procedures to run the RainCode Roadmap overnight or every week. When dealing with such large volumes, the delicate work of defining these batch procedures, managing the configuration files, etc. is certainly worth the trouble.

On the other hand, one sometimes wants to produce documentation for a dozen source files, as a one shot operation, which should not necessarily be repeated in the near future. For such short-lived cases, going through the process of defining the batches is painful. In order to address these cases, one can use the Roadmap-Wizard, which automates most of the tasks related to the definition of a RainCode Roadmap batch.

A Roadmap batch is defined as an XML file, which defines all the modules, the groups and the various properties of these elements. It contains one or more file list; that is a collection of modules.

The batch is displayed graphically in a tree-view, listing the various file lists it contains. Each list can be exploded or imploded in a standard Windows File Explorer fashion. The group it belongs to, the programming language and the number of files it contains are displayed.

Adding files to a file list is merely a question of dragging files from Windows Explorer onto the file list. One can even start Explorer from within the Roadmap wizard, by clicking on the "Launch Explorer" button.

This tree view behaves more or less in the same way as the one in the Windows File Explorer. You can double-click on a tree node to toggle between the open and closed views. You can also click on the + sign next to a tree node to open it and on the - sign next to a tree node to close it.

Platform and languages

The Roadmap is available for the following languages:

• Ada
• COBOL
• Informix 4GL
• PL/1