Overview

This tutorial explains how to create your first EMF Metamodel. This tutorial can be seen as the start of Sirius Starter Tutorial before Starter Tutorial.

We will create the basic family Metamodel

Create my first metamodel

Our metamod will have 4 concepts. These concepts will be the basics concepts about family.

The first concept is Family. A family has a name type of Estring.

A family contains members type of Person. A person has a name type of EString.

A person has 2 parents and many or no children.

Two concepts herited from Person are Man and Woman.

A person should have 1 father type of Man or/and 1 mother type of Woman or neither father nor mother.

To sum up, our metamodel have 4 concepts

Family
Person
Man
Woman

and 6 relations

members from Family to Person
children from Person to Person, with cardinality 0..*
parents from Person to Person with cardinality 0..2
father from Person to Man with cardinality 0..1
mother from Person to Woman with cardinality 0..1
an extend from Person for Man and Woman

How to create our Metamodel

We will use Ecore Tools (based on EMF and Sirius) to create our Metamodel. You can find it here: EcoreTools site To install it, menu Help/Install New Software...

Click on Add… button and fill the fields

Name: Ecore Tools Modeler
Location: One of update site of EcoreTools UpdateSite

Click on Ok button

Ckick on Next > and follow instructions.

After Sirius has restarted, in Model Explorer View, right click New->Other...

In Ecore Modeling Framework select Ecore Modeling Project

Name it org.eclipse.sirius.sample.basicfamily

Click on Finish button, then select the Design viewpoint.

Now you can use the palette to create the elements of the metamodel described previously. Click on Class in palette to create Family, Person, Man and Woman. The element Person is abstract.

Click on Relation Composition in palette to create compostion named members between Family and Person.

Click on Relation Bi-directional Reference in palette to create the bi directional reference named children and parents on Person

Click on Relation SuperType in palette to create the inheritence between Mand and Person and Woman and Person

You should obtain this metamodele

For more informations about Ecore Tools modeler Links to blog post on best practices to create a metamodel:

How to generate the source code of the Metamodel

You should retrieve the basicfamily.ecore Ns URI. Open the basicfamily.ecore and select tab Model in properties view. Change the Ns URI to http://www.eclipse.org/sirius/sample/basicfamily

Open the basicfamily.genmodel. This model allows EMF to generate the Java code corresponding to the metamodel.

Right click on first model element and select Generate All

The "Generate All" produces these elements :

The code src in org.eclipse.sirisus.sample.basicfamily
The MANIFEST.MF in the META-INF directory
The directory org.eclipse.sirisus.sample.basicfamily.edit
The directory org.eclipse.sirisus.sample.basicfamily.editor
The directory org.eclipse.sirisus.sample.basicfamily.tests

How to test the metamodel

Launch a runtime to use the basic family concept.

In Model Explorer View, right click New->Other...

In Eclipse Modeling Framework Example EMF Model Creation Wizards, select BasicFamily Model

As you can see the BasicFamily Model have the default EMF icons. To change this icon, modifiy BasicfamilyModelFile.gif in /org.eclipse.sirisus.sample.basicfamily.editor/icons/full/obj16/

Replace by