You can browse and navigate through the source code using the mechanisms described in this chapter.
Important: the hyperlink mechanism and the declaration/body visitor mechanism depend on semantic analysis provided by the compiler. These browsing and navigation mechanisms will have no effect until the corresponding code has been compiled. Additionally, changes to the source code can invalidate this analysis, so proper functionality requires recompilation when the source code has changed.
Note that compilation is sufficient, you need not actually build the executable.
Moreover, you can invoke the required analysis manually instead of actually compiling the files. To do so, select the "Analyze Project Sources" command in either the Project menu or the project-level contextual menus of the Navigator or Ada Project Explorer. This command will invoke the compiler in a mode that produces the required information without producing object code. The following figure shows the command in the Project menu:
Regardless of how the analysis is invoked, the results are represented by the "ALI" files (*.ali). Although the ALI files are simple text files, they should not be manually modified. Deleting them will require recompilation of the corresponding source files.