Extractor API

→ central API of the LCE tool that orchestrates the language concept extraction and export process

• controlled by the user via CLI calls of the tool

Central Function: Detect and scan all projects that are located within a provided scan directory and export the extracted information to a JSON file

Steps:

1. locating any source projects contained within the provided scan path
2. determining any metadata needed for further processing (e.g. references to other projects, locations of important config files, etc.)
3. initializing any required APIs
4. executing the traverser for the individual source files to extract the language concepts from the code
5. bundling the extracted concepts and the acquired project metadata into project objects
6. executing the post processors on the project objects
7. exporting the project objects to a JSON file

Implementation

• depends on the used CLI library
• simplest case: just a collection of static functions called by a main method or similar