Web Application Slicing in Presence of Dynamic Code Generation

The computation of program slices on Web applications may be useful during debugging, when the amount of code to be inspected can be reduced, and during understanding, since the search for a given functionality can be better focused. The system dependence graph is an appropriate data structure for slice computation, in that it explicitly represents all dependences that have to be taken into account in slice determination. Construction of the system dependence graph for Web applications is complicated by the presence of dynamically generated code. In fact, a Web application builds the HTML code to be transmitted to the browser at run time. Knowledge of such code is essential for slicing. In this paper an algorithm for the static approximation of the dynamically generated HTML code is proposed. The concatenations of constant strings and variables are propagated according to special purpose flow equations, allowing the estimation of the generated code and the refinement of the system dependence graph.