I'd like to build a data dictionary of the master files and .fex(es?) in my development environment by reporting where master files and data elements are being used. Is there a way I can retrieve this information from my MRE environment? We are WebFocus 7.6.4, IIS, SQL server 2005, and Oracle 9i.

thanks in advance for any and all assistance.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Your master file descriptions are stored on the reporting server, not in the MRE repository.

There are other posts on this topic as well but the best way to do this is to use operating system commands to generate lists of files, break them down by directory, do searches in focexecs to see where they are used, using CHECK FILE in a loop to generate a list of data elements, etc.

There is an impact analysis tool in 7.6 but it seems better suited to individual master searches as opposed to an entire implementation.

Anyway, I do many things of this nature in my environment using the processes I described above.

Maybe someone else has a better way that is less work.

We want that too James.

There is as far as I know not something like the resources analyzer that works on the MRE data.
What you can do is create your fexes in the EDA and do the analyzes there.
The other solution would be to create an application that reads all the fexes and creates a meta data set.

Thanks for the replies. I was looking in the wrong place. Ginny, thank you for pointing me in the right direction

Your MRE fexes are stored in basedir which is a directory structure against which you can use operating system commands. You can create a dummy master (I call mine LINE80) and you can filedef a focexec to it and parse it looking for the names of masters. That is parsing free-form text and it is not an easy thing to do.

After finding a used master in the fex you have to find out if it is a known master or just an intermediate hold master.
And that is only the beginning.
What fields are used?
How about defines?

It might be a better way to put all this basic information in the first lines with comment. Something like

-* 
-* masters: CAR
-* fields: COUNTRY, MODEL
-* 
-* fex starts here