Chrono-Logic Offers Cross Reference Tool for LANSA

by Alex Woodie

If you develop in LANSA, you may want to check out a new cross-reference tool announced by Chrono-Logic last week. The new product, iAM Analyser, is a cross-reference tool designed to help Visual LANSA and LANSA for iSeries developers discover the relationships shared by LANSA functions, files, fields, and components, which can be very useful during impact analysis testing.

Whether you're making system-wide changes or just enhancing one small part of your LANSA application, you'll want to know how a change in one part of your LANSA application will affect other parts. Failure to do so can lead to new bugs being introduced into your system and can cost you valuable time in the long run.

Before the introduction of iAM Analyser last week, Chrono-Logic offered some cross-reference capabilities with its flagship product, a change management application specifically for LANSA, called iAM for Development. Like Chrono-Logic's other LANSA tools, iAM for Development was developed in LANSA and presents a LANSA-centric view of LANSA definitions and objects, as well as components that can be cross-referenced, such as triggers, access routes, referenced fields, and Web skeletons. Chrono-Logic says it presents data in the same way that LANSA developers see, understand, and work with the source.

Over the last year, Chrono-Logic, based in Montreal, Quebec, has been working closely with LANSA technologists on a new stand-alone cross-reference tool. Like the iAM for Development suite, iAM Analyser is tightly integrated with the LANSA development tools and provides a LANSA-centric view of things.

Chrono-Logic says that, for each LANSA repository definition and object, iAM Analyser lets users visualize all LANSA cross references and definitions included as part of the selected object, as well as any cross references and definitions currently using the selected object. The software does this in real time, for both Visual LANSA (a client/server development environment) and LANSA for iSeries (green-screen development).

iAM Analyser automates the process of defining relationships among every type of LANSA component, says Ghislain Jacques, Chrono-Logic's director of development and one of its co-founders. "The queries, APIs, and manual analysis of the source code to identify the LANSA cross references are now a thing of the past," he says. "Whether for components or for the fields, functions, processes, multilingual, and system variables, iAM Analyser always identifies all LANSA cross references."

Jacques says iAM Analyser is the perfect complement to Visual LANSA. "The developers who use Visual LANSA will be impressed by the quantity of information returned by iAM Analyser on components, and the time savings," he says. This is the perfect complement to Visual LANSA, the solution developers have been waiting for."

iAM Analyser is available now. Licenses are $3,000 per workstation. For more information, go to www.chrono-logic.ca.