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Contextual Information Sidebar

Understand 2.0 pushes information to you as you move about the editor in a source file. The place where the information is shown is the Contextual Information Sidebar (CIS)

Let's take the acryonym apart:

• C – contextual. Context is wherever you are in source code. In a file, at a line, inside a class, inside a method.
• I – information. That is what Understand provides – information about code.
• S – Sidebar. Hint… look for the "context" "information" on the right side of your editor.

The CIS watches where you are as you visit source code an pushes information about the file you are in and the scope you are in.

First the "File Context" area, which is divided into two tabs:

Structure Browser shows you the major parts of the file. In this case, Includes, public functions, so forth. It also highlights where you are in the editor in the Structure Browser – like a radar overview.

Next is the File Information tab:

Looks familiar doesn't it. It is the Information Browser, but always for the file your are editing. Note that how you configure the IB here, doesn't affect how the others in the rest of the GUI work – this one remembers just its settings.

Okay, so where ever you go, CIS tells you about the File you are in.

Now as you move about the file, your scope changes. Hence the second part, "Scope Context".

Again, it is divided into two sections. The first, is the Scope Information section, which is the Information Browser for the scope you are in:

Whatever scope you are in, the Scope Context IB shows you the Information Browser for it. Auto-magically.

Next up is something pretty new. I'm quasi-proud of it, because I thought of it. But a new engineer with Scitools, Rob Gempeler, implemented it. It is called the "Context Browser". Its job is to always tell you where you are, with quick links to higher scopes, AND, to provide a quick list of entities within a window of your cursor.

So above, we can see that when the cursor is at line 17, I'm in file ActionItem.cpp, Class ActionItem, and Public Virtual Function "redo". Further more, as I look at that region of code:

with a glance to the right I can see that "Applied" is an enumerator – 2, and REQUIRE is an unknown function (actually it is a macro I forgot to define).