Searching API usage examples in code repositories with sourcerer API search

  • Authors:
  • Sushil Bajracharya;Joel Ossher;Cristina Lopes

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California, Irvine;University of California, Irvine;University of California, Irvine

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of 2010 ICSE Workshop on Search-driven Development: Users, Infrastructure, Tools and Evaluation
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present Sourcerer API Search (SAS), a search interface to find API usage examples in large code repositories. SAS facilitates finding API usage examples by providing three unique features: (i) code snippets view for each result that shows the portions of code where APIs are used; (ii) Tag-cloud view of popular words to facilitate query reformulation, and (iii) filtering results using APIs to narrow search results. Furthermore, SAS uses a code index where each code entity is indexed with terms not only found in the entity but also in other entities having similar API usage. These features make SAS a novel search interface to find API usage examples in code repositories.