The Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge's Meta Catalog is an index that enables you to find where elements are used in your application. You can find where a temp-table is defined and where it is used in your application. You can find all the procedures and functions in your application. You can find where those procedures and functions are called. You can also add your own annotations to the code and have them included in the index. You can use this index to simplify analyzing the impact of proposed changes and carrying out those changes.
You can configure different catalogs for different tasks. You might want to have the data for each project in a different catalog. Alternately, you might want a catalog that stores data on function and procedure calls for all your projects together. You can also configure a master catalog linked to your software code management (SCM) system to provide a complete view of all your applications.
The Meta Catalog is a design-time tool. A catalog never stores any data that cannot be extracted from the source code by the content builders. Any time the catalog has stale data in it, you can eliminate the stale data by replacing the catalog. For example, if you remove files from a project and no longer want data from those files in the catalog, just rebuild the catalog using the catalog's definition from the Meta Catalog preferences.
The Meta Catalog uses content builders to extract the data from source files. The Progress Developer Studio for OpenEdge provides several predefined content builders.
There are two tools for searching through a catalog's data. The Meta Catalog Explorer provides a treeview representation of the data. The Meta Catalog Search allows you to create and save queries on the data. You can open files for editing from either the treeview or the Meta Catalog Search results view.
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