Managing JRipples States

Incremental Change, supported by JRipples tool, can be extremely difficult process and span well over couple days. Thus, it is important to periodically save the state of JRipples analysis. In this way, it is possible to keep track of decisions made throughout the process and quickly backtrack to the previous state if the wrong direction was undertaken. Moreover, saved states provide means for restoring work after possible crashes of Eclipse environment. Finally, JRipples state, saved immediately after parsing of a project, can be used as a baseline for future changes and in this way substantially save the time, needed for parsing of complex projects.

Actions for managing JRipples states are available through main JRipples menu and through local pull down menu ( button) in toolbar of JRipples views. These actions allows saving, loading, deleting and renaming JRipples states. Additionally, it is possible to view various statistics on the current state, including number of nodes and edges.



On the hard drive, JRipples configurations are stored as archived .jrp files in the file
workspace_adress/.metadata/.plugins/org.severe.jripples/JRipplesConfigurations.jar
where workspace_adress is the path to the current workspace.

Saving State

Save state action allows saving current state to disk. To save the state, a name (required) and a description (optional) of the state should be entered in their respective fields, and then “Save” button should be pressed. Please note that JRipples relies on jar archival tool, and thus saving a state to disk might take a while.



Loading State

Load state dialog allows restoring previously saved states. A state can be loaded by either double-clicking on the state’s row in the table, or by selecting the state and pressing “Load” button. Any problems, encountered during the load process, will be reported in Eclipse’s Error Log view. This, for example, may happen if some class was deleted from a project, but is present in saved state; however, such an error has no effect on overall loading process and will be simply ignored.

Managing States

Manage states action allows viewing of previously saved states, deleting outdated states and renaming states. To manage a state, it should be selected in the table, and then the “Delete” button for deletion or “Rename” button for renaming should be pressed.

Viewing statistics

Statistics window provides a summary of the current state of the dependency graph, including name of the current project, name of the main class, number of nodes in the dependency graph and so forth.