EEF/Tutorials/First Generation

Presentation

This first tutorial will show you the common use of EEF. It describes the step to obtains the EEF models and generate the associated. Finally, It shows how to link the generated code with a simple treeview EMF editor.

Tutorial

First you have to do this tutorial in a "EEF ready" environment. To obtain this environment, read the EEF Installation Guide.

EEF Models initialization

In the EEF environment, the first step is to initialize the EEF models. These models describe the visual elements of the generated editing components and the binding between these elements and the meta-classes of your meta-model. EEF provides an action to create these models. To call this action, perform a right click on the genmodel of your metamodel and lauch the action EEF > Initialize EEF models.

Generation and parameterization

The initializer has just created elements for meta-class attributes choosing predefined default widgets. So you need to parametrize models to model correctly the generation, for example, references representations, widgets changes.

By default, the generation is done in the plug-in where is the example model and the parametrization model assigns a "src-gen" directory to know where the code is going to be generated. This information can be modified.

When parametrization is done, generation can be done with the action "Generate EEF Architecture" on the right click on the EEFGen model.

The generation create an architecture displaying properties views corresponding to the parameterized models which have :

• Components for the control part
• Parts for views
• Providers for the structure instantiation

Global providers are also generated. They defined the instantiation strategy of the structure and the elements edition. This two providers have to be declared in the plugin.xml file with the extension points defined by EEF runtime (explained in the next part : EEF generation with EMF tree editor).

EEF Generation in EMF tree editor

• Add dependency on EEF runtime

In order to compile the code generation, the plug-in with the generated code must have a dependency on the EEF runtime : "org.eclipse.emf.eef.runtime". The tree editor has also to depend on it.