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MoDisco/Components/JSP/Documentation/0.9

< MoDisco‎ | Components‎ | JSP
Revision as of 04:53, 4 June 2010 by Nguyomar.sodifrance.fr (Talk | contribs) (User manual)

JSP Metamodel

The Modisco JSP Metamodel inherits from the Modisco XML one : JSP Metamodel.png


Inheritance was chosen because a JSP page uses the tag mechanism, attributes and comments, and is nearly well formed regarding the XML Metamodel.

Metamodel Architecture

According to the "Java Server Pages Specifications Version 1.2", JSP content is divided into 4 categories :

  • JSP Scripts :
    • JSP Scriplet : <% int variable = 0;%>
    • JSP Expression : <%= variable %>
    • JSP Declaration : <%! int variable = 0; %>
  • JSP Actions : <myPrefix:myAction arg1="value" />
    • JSP Standard Action : <jsp:getProperty name="beanName" property="propertyNamef" />
  • JSP Directive : <%@ include file="myFilePath" %>
    • JSP TagLib : <%@ taglib prefix="myPrefix" uri="taglib/mytag.tld" %>
  • Comments : <%-- This is a JSP comment --%>


User manual

The plug-in provides the user with a contextual menu to easily create JSP models.

By right-clicking on a JSP Project in the Eclipse Package Explorer view, you can quickly create the JSP model of your application (see next Figure).


Menus in Eclipse to create JSP model from source code

You can also select one or several file to create a model for each one of them

Menus in Eclipse to create JSP model from several files


Once launched, a progress bar will appear at the bottom of the window as soon as the operation begins. Depending on the size of your application, the reverse engineering process might take some time to complete (see next Figure).

Progress bar during model creation

At the end of the process, the newly created model files are added to the root of your project and are automatically opened in the default editor (see next Figure).

JSP model in the package explorer

.jspxmi files can be opened in the Sample Ecore Model Editor (see next Figure).

Sample Ecole Model Editor


They can also be opened in the MoDisco model browser (see next Figure) which brings some graphical improvements, like UiCustomisation by MoDisco

Model Model Browser

MetaModel Limits

Because JSP language is used to generated some content, it can be placed almost anywhere in the file, which imply certain limitations:


This is why the "isTagFragment : EBoolean" attribute was added. In fact, everything contain in a tag declaration as in its body is considered as children. It is indeed necessary to be able to differentiate whether the JSP tag is used to generate the tag description, or its body.

Some way of implementing JSP might cause some problem with the parser, especially for tag's attributes evaluation. What is expected to be found is some kind of syntax like :

name="value" or name='value' and even name=value

Sometimes we faced implementations like : <tag name=" <% if(condition){ %> value1" <% }else{ %> value2" <% } %> >

The parser finds the opening double quote for the attribute's value, then looks for the closing one.

Returned value will be: JSP Metamodel Limit 1.png with an exception raised on the last double quote, because '=' is expected.

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