People involved with programming activities know how difficult it becomes to maintain (large/complex) codes. Programs that you have written yourself are difficult enough to understand when you come back to them  later. Things are more difficult when the program have been written by someone else or a big team, and has been modified and added so many times that the existing documentation no longer accurately reflects the program code and structure. This is a nightmare awaiting those involved with program maintenance, comprehension, audit, or analysis. Therefore, tools that automate the process of code analysis and documentation clearly help to overcome this problem painlessly.

UNIVERSAL REPORT is a high quality code analysis and documentation software. Its goal is to analyse and generate a structured and well formatted documentation of a given program. Universal Report can handle various programming languages (Basic, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Java, Javascript, Matlab, Pascal, Visual Basic, Borland C++ Builder, Delphi, Kylix, Perl,  PL1, Python, Visual C++, Visual Basic .Net, Visual C#, Visual J++, and more), and generates html, latex, and plain text documentations using state-of-the-art pattern matching algorithms and compilation techniques. The tool is parameterizable both in the behavior point of view and the quality/layout of the outputs.

Its Features are:

• Multi programming language: There is no hard coded programming language limitation on the source code that can be processed by Universal Report.
• Several output formats: The output documentation can be in html, plain text, or latex. However, html format is the most mature and featured.
• Direct reporting: Since Universal Report is not dedicated to a specific programming language and can document a mixed source code, there is a possibility to document a source code without any prior technical information. In that case, Universal Report will attempt to automatically detect extract crucial information and either continue with the documentation process or prompt on the next step of the wizard.
• Multi reporting: Universal Report can perform several independent documentation tasks at a time, regardless of the programming languages involved and the input/output locations.
• Database reporting: Universal Report can read database files and generates a detailed report of the structure and elements (tables, fields, attributes).
• Automatic download and upload: The path of the input files to be documented could be a web location. In that case, Universal Report will make and inventory of the matching files and download them into the local disk and proceed from it.
• Two way of achieving a documentation session: A documentation session can be achieved either by starting from scratch using the wizard or the direct report feature, or from a .urp file.
• UDIFF tool: UDIFF is a file differencing tool that compares two files and reports the differences and highlights the changes
• Changes analysis and reporting: When the source code has changed, documenting from the previous .urp automatically activates the changes analysis routine of Universal Report.
• Fast and robust processing: Universal Report uses state-of-the-art algorithms to parse the source code and analyze its elements. The process is quiet fast and robust.
• Highly optimized output: The ouput documentation produced by Universal Report is highly optimized by a state-of-the-art html encoding and javascript implementations.
• Trace/Bug handling and Live Update: There is an option that activates an automatic tracing system. In that case, each step is recorded from the wizard to the main execution of the documentation.