Run Prolint for the first time

When you have installed proparse and prolint you are ready to run Prolint for the first time.


Let's take the quick tour:

run the following statement from a Progress procedure editor:

     RUN prolint/desktop.w.

In the Prolint Desktop, choose button "Lint files...".

You will now see a dialog, titled "Prolint - select files to lint".

This dialog contains an editor widget where you can enter a list of sourcefiles that will be processed by Prolint. Each filename should be entered on a new line, wildcards are currently not supported.
The easiest way to populate the list is by using drag and drop: open a Windows Explorer, select one or more
Progress sourcefiles and drag/drop them into the dialog.


Please note that Prolint can only do its work on sources that are syntactically correct: the Progress compiler must be able to compile them without errors.
That's why we actually prefer the term "compilation unit" instead of "sourcefile": an includefile is a sourcefile but not a compilation unit.


For this first test, just select one or two files and press the OK button.

After you pressed OK, the dialog will immediately disappear and now you will see the "Prolint Results window" unless you are using a TTY-client.


Proparse will now initialize itself and show its splash screen (the frog picture). This may take a little while because proparse needs to read the database schema, but this only happens the very first time
in each Progress session. When you run prolint again (in the same Progress session) initialization will be skipped.

When initialization is done, Prolint will start inspecting the compilation-units you selected. After that you will get to
see a list of warnings in the Results window, unless Prolint didn't find anything in your source to warn about (in that rather unlikely case, the
status bar of the Results window will indicate "0 warnings").

When you double-click on a warning, an external text editor will open the sourcefile to the specified line number
(actually, this feature will probably not work for you yet, because it is by default configured to launch UltraEdit-32. We will change that later in "settings").

You can now press button "Lint current" - this will run prolint again for the compilation-unit on the currently selected browse row.
Or you can press button "Lint files" which will start the first dialog again, where you can select a new set of files to lint. Or you can open a popup-menu
on the browse (right-mouse button) and open a help file explaining the rule for the focussed line.