Using ESEARCH to find hidden process references

Colleague Studio is a very user friendly tool that can do many things with simple mouse clicks. However, it's not perfect, and sometimes it does not do what it says it does 100% to completion. Let's take "Show Reference" for example. Colleague Studio will show you a partial list of processes that reference a particular process. If you still have access to the terminal in Desktop UI, using ESEARCH command can help in these kinds of research.

We will look at one of the Ellucian's delivered subroutine, S.CHECK.IF.WITHDRAWN, for this example. When checking for references in Colleague Studio, the list looks like this:

Now that I know this subroutine is mainly called in ST, I can go to the terminal and check for the complete list.

The above screen shows the usage of ESEARCH. You specify the folder/category of processes you want to search for. The above searches for UI/Webadvisor forms in ST. After the search, the result is saved in a savedlist named DTP. When you open DTP up, either in the terminal or in UI using SLED, you will see the more complete list of UI/Webadvisor forms that reference S.CHECK.IF.WITHDRAWN in ST.

Looking at the result, we can see more processes that reference S.CHECK.IF.WITHDRAWN than what Colleague Studio provides. I have found that Colleague doesn't not maintain references to custom processes very well, so ESEARCH is a good way to double-check. You can search for processes in corresponding applications:

appl.SUBROUTINES -> appl subroutines

appl.SOUCE -> appl screens

All of this requires you to have access to the terminal, of course. You can do a similar search using the window explorer on the Colleague file server, but that takes way longer for me.

How to search for text/process/data element using ESEARCH

If you have access to Colleague terminal (through UI desktop, if you still have it), using ESEARCH can give you more accurate and complete results than the function "Find Reference" in Colleague Studio.

After you're in terminal, use this syntax to look for references to subroutine S.MY.TEST.SUB.

ESEARCH ST.SUBROUTINES  <enter>
>>>>S.MY.TEST.SUB  <enter>

SAVE.LIST SOME.SAVEDLIST <enter>

ELE SAVEDLISTS SOME.SAVEDLIST000 <enter> (note the three 0s were added)

P <enter> (P to browse the file, Q to quit)


ESEARCH is fairly fast. The only limitation is has is that you need to go in different modules such as ST.SUBROUTINES or CORE.SUBROUTINES or ST.SOURCE to search for them. Colleague Studio maintains pretty good references, but sometimes it misses customized processes.