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Capella/Viewpoints/Practice
This page explains how to develop a viewpoint for Capella with Capella Studio. It is illustrated with the Basic Mass viewpoint downloadable from the Capella website.
Contents
First Steps
Three means enables to start working with a viewpoint in a workspace:
- Importing a viewpoint
- Creating a new viewpoint
- Reversing an ecore
The third option is not presented here.
Option #1: Import of the Basic Mass viewpoint
This first option is to import the viewpoint as depicted below from the Plug-ins view, with the "Import As"/"Source Project" command.
After the import of the viewpoint plugins, open the model folder in the vpdsl plugin.
Open a vptext file by double-click. If an error occurs, this means that the vptext is not recognized automatically. In this case, on the vptext file, right-click and Open With Data / User Interface / Diagram / Configuration for the data / ui / diagram / conf vptext files.
Viewpoint description: Model and text equivalence
The viewpoint description with Kitalpha is stored in a model (.vpdesc file) and edited with a set of editors dedicated by aspect.
Option #2: Creation of viewpoint
Instead of importing the viewpoint, it is possible to create it from scratch:
- First Step: apply the commands: File/New…/Project – Viewpoint DSL Project
- Second Step: Set the name, choose Capella
To create a new aspect, in the mass.spec.vptext:
- CTRL+Space: choose the new aspect to be created
- Modify the name of the aspect file and Finish
Viewpoint Aspects
Data
The Data aspect is essential because information of some other aspects (e.g., UI, Diagram) is deducted from the data description.
In this figure, the classes Mass and PartMass have attributes and no association.
Inheritance
Inheritance is identified by the key word superClass, such as for PartMass. Mass has no inheritance. Due to the "Capella" Target Application, during the generation of the ecore file (Cf. org.polarsys.capella.vp.mass plugin), a class without superclass inherits from the Capella NamedElement class.
The mechanism of inheritance enables to a have complete inheritance at the viewpoint level, not only from the data but also for the diagrams for instance.
Extension
An extension creates extension elements in an extended element. For Basic Mass, PartMass extends (Capella) Part. All the PartMass elements are contained by a Part element.
User Interface
The UI contents is empty at the beginning. Populate it by CTRL-Space and selection of the "UI - Generate User Interface for all classes" option in the menu. The generated contents is deduced from the data description. The generation is not incremental. This means that when the Data aspect part evolves, a new generation is produced apart and ignores the previous one.
By CTRL-Mouse on an attribute (e.g. mass.data.Mass.value), it is possible to navigate toward the attribute defined in the Data aspect.
Diagram
A diagram is made of three parts: 1) the diagram extension when a diagram extends an existing one, 2) the mapping of the data onto diagram elements, 3) the actions applicable on the diagram.
To be continued