>This is something that has been put off a long time. We have many files that are no longer used. What is the best plan of attack to get as clean of a project as we can, where the code that is in it, and in the supporting directories, is only the code we need/use? We have a table driven menu, so some things will have to be looked at manually to see if they are needed. We can create an empty project, add the main program, and rebuild, but won't that also pickup up stuff that's not used if there is any reference to it in other code? How should we proceed? I'm tired of having useless files, references, a large EXE and bad code reference searches in this application. Any help appreciated.

Hi Renoir,

This is certainly a daunting task. I started to do something similar at Bata/Bolivia, but it was always postponed (by order from above), in favor of things deemed more urgent.

Much of our programming is done in forms; I added code, in the generic form class, to write information to a form usage log, every time a user opens a form. Analyzing a year of data or so can certainly help as a starting-point, but on the one hand, there are maintenance tasks that only need to be done, say, once a year - but are still needed! - on the other hand, a user may simply open a form, to see what it does, and then decide that it wasn't what he was looking for.

I guess we must manually go through different components - forms, tables, perhaps some classes - and think whether we still need it or not. Then, for every component we plan to eliminate, do a careful analysis (in VFP 9, I guess that would be Code References), to see where a certain component is used. Finally, instead of eliminating an element, move it to a folder named "Obsolete" or something similar.

I don't think there is any way to automate a great part of this job.