Identifying and analyzing multiple level class relationships in an object oriented system by parsing source code without compilation

摘要

A system and method for identifying class relationships in an object oriented system. An object oriented program in an object oriented source code language is parsed for the immediate class relationship data. The immediate class relationship data is stored in a relation data library. In response to a user query, a derive engine is employed to derive multiple level class relationship data from the immediate class relationship data. The multiple class relationship data is presented on a system display to the user. As the number of immediate class relationships captured by the parser will be overwhelmingly huge in the case of a huge object oriented system, the derivation step is preferably divided into two. In anticipation of the user query, the immediate relationship data for each class of object is preprocessed and stored in a facts library according to class and type of relationship. This facts library is traversed by the derive engine in response to the user query to derive the multiple level class relationship data.