{"id":3853,"date":"2010-06-09T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-09T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/vcblog\/2010\/06\/09\/exploring-the-visual-c-browse-database\/"},"modified":"2019-02-18T18:45:30","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T18:45:30","slug":"exploring-the-visual-c-browse-database","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/exploring-the-visual-c-browse-database\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the Visual C++ Browse Database"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hello, this is Jim Springfield.  <\/span>This post will cover some low-level details about how we represent information in the browse database in VS 2010.  <\/span>As I’ve mentioned in a previous <\/span>post<\/span><\/a>, we are using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) for storing information about all of the C, C++, and IDL files in your solution.  <\/span>I will show some SQL examples that illustrate how to mine this database for information about your code.<\/span><\/p>\n

NOTE: The particular database schema we use in VS2010 may very well change in future versions, so the examples I show may not work in future versions of VS.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Opening the SDF file<\/span><\/h2>\n

The database file (SDF) can normally be found in the same directory as your solution file (SLN), although it may get relocated if your SLN is on a network share or a flash drive.  <\/span>You can open the SDF using several different tools.  <\/span>SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) is a good one if you have access to it.  <\/span>However, you can also open it in Visual Studio itself.  <\/span>Before opening the SDF to play with, it is best to close the associated solution.  <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

1.<\/span>       <\/span><\/span><\/span>Within VS, go to the “Server Explorer” window, right click on “Data Connections”, and select “Add Connection…”.<\/span><\/p>\n

2.<\/span>       <\/span><\/span><\/span>Select “Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5” for the Data Source and click “Continue”.<\/span><\/p>\n

3.<\/span>       <\/span><\/span><\/span>Click the “Browse…” button and then navigate to the SDF file to open.<\/span><\/p>\n

4.<\/span>       <\/span><\/span><\/span>If the SDF file is large (i.e. > 250MB), you will need to set an option before opening.  <\/span>To do this, click the “Advanced…” button and set “Max Database Size” to something larger than the SDF you are opening.  <\/span>4091MB is the largest value allowed and you can just use that if you wish.<\/span><\/p>\n

5.<\/span>       <\/span><\/span><\/span>Finally, click the “OK” button and VS should open your SDF file.<\/span><\/p>\n

Learning your way around<\/span><\/h2>\n

If you expand the new node for your SDF in Server Explorer, you will see a “Tables” node.  <\/span>Expand that and you can see all of the tables that are currently defined.  <\/span>The “code_items” table contains information on every definition and declaration that occur in your source.  <\/span>I don’t have space to cover what all of the tables do, but take a look around.  <\/span>Don’t expect to see data in the refs or symbols tables as those are there for some possible future use.  <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Note:  <\/span>Don’t try to make changes to the schema or indexes and expect that to persist.  <\/span>When we open the SDF for actual browsing use, we do a consistency check and if anything is not “correct”, we delete the SDF and rebuild it.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Take a look at the “code_item_kinds” table.  <\/span>You can see the contents by right-clicking and selecting “Show Table Data”.  <\/span>There should be 59 entries here.  <\/span>These values are used in the “code_items” table and you can use them in queries to find certain types of code items.<\/span><\/p>\n

Creating a query<\/span><\/h2>\n

Right click on the “code_items” table and select “New Query”.  <\/span>You will get a query window with some tools that help you build and run queries.  <\/span>A window will popup asking you to add a table.  <\/span>Just click close as you will just be copying queries into the query window for now.<\/span><\/p>\n

Try this query first to get your feet wet.  <\/span>To run a query, click the red exclamation icon in the toolbar or press “Ctrl+R”.<\/span><\/p>\n

select * from code_items where kind=1<\/span><\/p>\n

This query returns all code items that are C++ classes.  <\/span>If you look at all of the columns, most should ma\nke sense.  <\/span>Note that the database gives start and end position information for the entire class and just the name portion of the code item.  <\/span>It is hard to see what file a code item comes from, however, as the code_items table uses a file_id and not a filename.  <\/span>To see the filename as well, try the following query which does a join with the files table to get the filename.<\/span><\/p>\n

SELECT     <\/span>f.name, ci.*<\/span><\/p>\n

FROM       <\/span>code_items AS ci<\/span><\/p>\n

           <\/span>INNER JOIN files AS f ON ci.file_id = f.id<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

WHERE     <\/span>(ci.kind = 1)<\/span><\/p>\n

One thing to notice is that this query returns information on code items that occur in your own code as well as in the SDK and other headers.  <\/span>You can return information for files that are explicitly in your solution by using the “config_files” table.  <\/span>This table has a column that indicates whether a file is implicit or explicit.  <\/span>A file may have multiple entries in the config_files table as a file can be used in multiple configs\/projects.  <\/span>The “DISTINCT” keyword prevents returning duplicate copies of code items.<\/span><\/p>\n

SELECT   <\/span>DISTINCT f.name, ci.*<\/span><\/p>\n

FROM     <\/span>code_items AS ci <\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>INNER JOIN files AS f ON ci.file_id = f.id<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>INNER JOIN config_files AS cf ON ci.file_id = cf.file_id<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

WHERE    <\/span>(cf.implicit = 0) AND (ci.kind = 1)<\/span><\/p>\n

The parent_id in the code_items table refers to another item in the code_items table.  <\/span>Using this information, you can get some parent\/child information.  <\/span>The id of 0 is the global namespace.  <\/span>So, to get all functions in the global namespace you could do this.<\/span><\/p>\n

SELECT    <\/span>*<\/span><\/p>\n

FROM      <\/span>code_items<\/span><\/p>\n

WHERE     <\/span>(kind = 22) AND (parent_id = 0)<\/span><\/p>\n

You can also join the code_items table to itself to find a set of code_items whose parent matches some set of criteria.  <\/span>The following example finds all functions whose parent code_item is named “ATL”.<\/span><\/p>\n

SELECT     <\/span>ci1.*<\/span><\/p>\n

FROM         <\/span>code_items AS ci1 INNER JOIN<\/span><\/p>\n

             <\/span>code_items AS ci2 ON ci2.id = ci1.parent_id<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

WHERE     <\/span>(ci1.kind = 22) AND (ci2.name = ‘ATL’)<\/span><\/p>\n

I have only scratched the surface of what you can do to mine the SDF for interesting information about your source code.  <\/span>There are many other ways to leverage the data contained in the SDF to gather information about your source code.  <\/span>All of our browsing features for C\/C++ are implemented on top of the SDF.  <\/span>We do take advantage of some caching, prepared commands, and the special “table direct” mode that SSCE provides in order to increase performance, but everything comes from the SDF at some point.<\/span><\/p>\n

The query processor in SSCE is limited in some ways, but you could even replicate the data from the SDF into a full SQL database and perform even more complex queries than are allowed by SSCE.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Jim Springfield
Visual C++ Architect<\/span><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hello, this is Jim Springfield.  This post will cover some low-level details about how we represent information in the browse database in VS 2010.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we are using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) for storing information about all of the C, C++, and IDL files in your solution.  I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":35994,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,47],"class_list":["post-3853","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cplusplus","tag-browsing","tag-sdf"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Hello, this is Jim Springfield.  This post will cover some low-level details about how we represent information in the browse database in VS 2010.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we are using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) for storing information about all of the C, C++, and IDL files in your solution.  I […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/cppblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}