If you have ever used the JDEdwards cross-reference facility in an attempt to find where a certain table column is used, you understand that it can be difficult, especially when the alias for your column is common.

Let’s say you have a custom table [F550001] that has a column [URRF], and you need to find all programs that use the F550001.URRF. Well, you may have 50 custom programs that use F550001 and there may be 250 programs, native and custom, that use the alias URRF. You can see the difficulty in searching through 50 programs to find 5 that reference F550001.URRF.

If, however, you take the 50 custom programs that reference F550001 and export them to the spreadsheet program of your choice and then export the 250 programs that reference the URRF to another spreadsheet, you can filter the 50 references to F550001 down to only those programs that also reference URRF. Now, you still may have a few extra programs in your list — programs that don’t reference F550001.URRF — but you now have a much smaller list to work from.