Over the years, Radix has continuously developed utility programs in AS/400 as aid in its software conversion and maintenance efforts. Eventually, this set of tools has been called RAPIDS, which stands for Radix Project Inventory and Documentation System. RAPIDS was designed to address Program Inventory, Text Search, Work With and Program Hierarchy Tracing capabilities.

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The main problem normally encountered during a conversion or maintenance process is to ascertain the completeness of the objects and source codes and to determine the up-to-date version of the source codes that corresponds to the current compiled objects. Based on experience, most DP departments have not been cleaning up and organizing their development and production libraries. Before the start of any project, Radix personnel ensures that the source code to be modified corresponds to the latest compiled version.

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Using RAPIDS, a project library is initially set up wherein all the output files will be stored. The libraries that will be included in the inventory process will be enrolled in the project. Once all the libraries are identified, the batch programs will run to generate the output files. Actual running time is dependent on the number of objects and the machine model that can take from 1 hour to 8 hours. The processing may be iterative because some libraries may have been left out at the onset.

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After the output files are generated, several reports may be used to print the following items:

• Object to Source Inventory Summary
• Object to Source Inventory Detail
• Objects with No Source Member Found
• Objects with Source in Source List (source not in library where object was compiled from)
• Objects with Duplicate Sources
• Critical Sources (source modified after object creation)

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Work With functions are also available to display and print the following items:

• List of Files
• File-Fields List
• Objects List by Type
• Program to Called Program View/List
• Program to Calling Program View/List
• Program Hierarchy

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Text Search Capability

Determining the affected programs is a major effort not only during project estimating but also during the actual program modifications. Visually scanning all the source codes is quite tedious and prone to errors. Thus, a text search capability has been added to RAPIDS.

A list of items to search for is initially set up such as date fields for Y2K projects and amount fields for Euro projects. RAPIDS does not have an automatic process to identify these items. Normally, these are field names, which are manually ticked off from the database and confirmed by the customer. A filtering process can be done, however, to short list the desired fields by name, length and type or combinations thereof.

With the list of items, RAPIDS traces their usage in the other components of the system (data files, programs, displays, and reports) by searching the sources of defined libraries. Additionally, it monitors for occurrences of each item for each found object. The number of occurrence is normally used to measure the complexity of modifications required during estimating. In actual program modifications, it is also used as a guide to ensure that all the identified items have been properly addressed.

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