Introduction

This document assumes that the Helix QAC software has been successfully installed on the target machine and that licensing has been correctly set up. The Helix QAC software will request license server details the first time that it starts.

Incorrect settings will not prevent the Helix QAC software from running, but analysis of code will fail with a clear indication that this is because the license check has failed.

License server details can be set by clicking License Servers on the Admin menu. For help setting up a license server, please contact support.

For users of Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Eclipse based IDEs, Helix QAC offers plug-ins for these applications. The plugins can be found under the ide_plugins directory, below the Helix QAC software installation directory, for example: 

Helix-QAC-<version>\ide_plugins

Instructions on installing the plug-ins are given within the relevant language folder in the applicable sub-directories.

Throughout this document, text that represents a typed command, file name or a directory structure, is given in a monospace font, for example:

prqaproject.xml.

The Helix QAC software exists principally to present you with a convenient means of triggering the analysis of chosen source code files, and examining the analysis results.

The Helix QAC program runs separately and independently from the code under examination, using existing build environment information to inform itself about your code.

It is intended that you take the results from Helix QAC and, in your existing code development environment, make changes based on those results.

Whilst Helix QAC does have a basic text file editing capability, Helix QAC is not intended to be used as a direct development tool to work on the code project files.

It is possible to operate Helix QAC in automated circumstances, such as applying analysis routinely to sets of code on a build server. However, such operation is beyond the scope of this guide.

The Helix QAC software is designed to fit around an existing code project, reading the existing code build configuration information to gather the information; that is, source files, Include paths, environment settings, and other relevant details. As such, Helix QAC cannot simply be "pointed at" a single source file and asked to examine it, although of course it is perfectly possible to have a project containing a single file (one of the sample projects, sample_inspect_c, is just such a project).

The Helix QAC software stores information about a project’s files in a file called prqaproject.xml, and in the directory prqa, although their format and content may change with future revisions of the software. The contents of these files should not be modified in any way.