Leverage AI services
Overview
Did you know that CAST Imaging can interface with various third-party Artificial Intelligence services, allowing you to obtain additional AI-driven insight into your application source code? You can obtain information about specific objects, objects within the scope of your application and about specific transactions.
How does it work?
Set up is simple: obtain an API key or other configuration settings from a supported AI provider, configure it in CAST Imaging via the Admin option and enable the AI-driven CAST Imaging services you require. A user with the Administrator role is required to configure the settings.
You can find out more in AI Settings:
What can I do with AI?
All AI-driven services provided by CAST Imaging provide additional information about the code within your application. For example, you may want to find out exactly what a specific object is designed to do, based on AI’s interpretation of its code, or, you may want to get more insight into the full chain of a transaction in your application. Each available service is explained in more detail below.
Explain code with AI
Enables right click contextual menu options when consulting results at Object level:
Explain the object
This option provides an AI-driven explanation of the code in the object, directly in the source code viewer:
AI will also point out issues that it believes may exist in your source code:
Finally, two options are made available when the AI explanation has been provided:
- Save the explanation as a Post-It assigned to the object in question
- Re-load the explanation and provided additional details
Explain object in application context
This option will do two things:
- Open the object in a new tab and display all its immediate caller and callee objects
- Provide an explanation of the object based on its context within the application and store that explanation in a Post-It:
Assistant Chatbot
The Assistant Chatbot is a simple interface for asking direct questions about the application you are working on. It is available at any level and in all features within CAST Imaging when consulting results:
The responses returned by the chatbot are tailored to your application, for example you could ask about the technology stack that exists in your application, what frameworks are used, any dependencies that may exist etc.:
Predefined view recommendation
The Chatbot will recommend a predefined view if one is available and relevant to the query, for example after asking about database objects in the application, the Chatbot will recommend the predefined view Database Access:
Transaction summary
Creates an AI driven explanation of a given transaction, displayed in a Post-It, associated to the transaction itself.
To access this feature you will need to use the Customize the Results option available in the Landing page:
Then choose the Transaction Summary tab:
All transactions in your application will be listed in this panel. To generate the AI-drive explanation:
- select the transactions you are interested in
- choose the method of generating the explanation:
- Graph Representation Method: summarizes transactions by providing the entire transaction graph, offering a comprehensive overview of all connected objects and their relationships for a holistic understanding
- Exclusive Object Method: summarizes transactions by focusing on unique objects within the transaction graph, highlighting key points of divergence or importance
- click the Generate Transaction Summary button to begin the process
A green tick will indicate that the process has completed. A status icon also exists showing the process of any on-going and queued jobs:
To view the result:
- consult your application results
- switch to the Transaction scope and select the transaction you have generated an AI-drive explanation for
- the transaction will display in a new tab
- click the Post-It to view the AI explanation: