Financial

Client

Software vendor. Financial software, primarily for insurance industry. This office in US primarily does business internationally. A subsidiary of a large US. Financial software holding company.

Challenge

Documenting the hard-coded values within a large Microsoft Windows financial application that has been developed over about eight years. This requires searching through almost 8,000 Cobol programs, Oracle stored procedures and Oracle forms for specific values.

Solution

After reviewing text search tools available, TextPipe appeared to be the only one that could perform complex searches of the programs for the values we are looking for. By complex, we need to exclude certain parts of these files (Program comments, similar values that are not the ones we are exactly looking for). For each specific search, needed the ability to record the results in one text file that contained the names and locations of the individual programs which contained the data I was looking for. 

Process

Decide which type of information I am looking for. Open my 'Template' Filter and tailor it for the precise search I want to conduct. My template filter has the following primary steps:

1. I delete all lines which do not contain the secondary text required on each line; I have set "Include line numbers" Parameter to no.
2. I delete all lines which contains text not allowed on each line; I have set "Include line numbers" Parameter to no.
3. Lastly, I select the primary text looking for; I have set "Include line numbers and file names" Parameters to yes.

This way, I receive the file names and line numbers only for the text I am interested in.