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VIATRA/Integration/DeveloperDocumentation/Xcore

Aim of the project

The Xcore project aims to provide a textual syntax for the definition of EMF metamodels. You can use it not only to specify the structure of your model, but also the behavior of your operations and derived features as well as the conversion logic of your data types. It eliminates the dividing line between modeling and programming, combining the advantages of each.

Viewing the scope of the EMF-IncQuery project an idea may immediately arise; it would be really nice to use the powerful pattern language of EMF-IncQuery to define derived features in your Xcore metamodel. This projects aim to support exactly this functionality, that is, beyond the standard Xcore way to define derived features (basically with Xbase expressions), it is now possible to refer to pattern definitions in the Xcore files. One can specify which pattern should serve as the underlying logic for the evaluation of the given derived feature in runtime.

The integration was developed as seamlessly as possible; all the original Xcore semantics and toolset are still available, however, the IncQuery & Xcore editor now supports the definition of the above mentioned features with additional features like validation, proposal providers, etc.

Requirements

  1. Eclipse Kepler release
  2. Latest Xtext release (2.4.x)
  3. Xcore (you can download it from the Kepler update site for example). At the moment the latest build does not contain some required patches, so for the time being please download the Xcore source plugins from the EMF git repository http://git.eclipse.org/c/emf/org.eclipse.emf.git.
  4. EMF-IncQuery (you can download it for example from the Eclipse Marketplace)

Overview and example

You can get a really good overview about the Xcore project here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Xcore. In this section we will use the same metamodel but with additional derived feature definitions. To start trying out the project, create a new Xcore project and an IncQuery & Xcore file with the file extension .xcoreiq.

Note that, at the moment you can only use the IncQuery support for Xcore files if the metamodel and the patterns are defined in the same project, that is, the project must have both Xcore and IncQuery natures.

The metamodel that we use deals with simple classes like Library and Books inside it. We also want to store the authors of these books and various properties like citations between the books, the own books of an author, etc.

Two kinds of derived features can be defined:

  • attributes (EAttribute) with the 'incquery-derived' keyword. Naturally, the type of these features can be only primitive types
  • references (EReference) with the 'incquery-derived refers' keyword. The type of these features can be any reference type (user-defined classes for example)

Metamodel (Library.xcoreiq)

The following figure shows the metamodel. Here we have defined 3 classes and the book category which is an enumeration for specifying the type of a book. Note the IncQuery based derived feature definitions. The formal definitions of these features:

  • Writer.ownBooks: the feature should return only those Books that have the Writer as the only author (no co-authors for the given book)
  • Book.allCitations: the feature should return all citations for the given book. This will be computed transitively, that is, if the citations are B1 -> B2 and B2 -> B3 then the set of all citations for the B1 book will contain both B2 and B3.
  • Book.numberOfCitations: the size of the Book.allCitations feature's value (the number of all citations)
  • Book.numberOfAuthors: the number of the co-authors for the given book

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Pattern definitions (LibraryPatterns.eiq)

The following figure shows the pattern definitions.

Xcoreiq 2.png

The generated metamodel artifacts can be used in two different use cases:

  1. Dynamic Instance Mode: debugging of metamodels and queries are made easy with this functionality. One can develop the metamodel and queries at the same time, in the same workspace. You just need to create a dynamic instance model and you can modify your model on the fly. All the values of the features can be observed through the Properties View of Eclipse.
  2. Using the Generated Code: the standard EMF model/edit/editor/tests code can be also generated and used in an other instance of Eclipse.


Advanced issues

SettingDelegates for the evalutation of derived features


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