Trace-based Approach to Editability and Correspondence Analysis for Bidirectional Graph Transformations ?
Soichiro Hidaka, Martin Billes, Quang Tran Minh, Kazutaka Matsuda · 2015
Bidirectional graph transformation is expected to play an important role in model-driven software engineering where artifacts are often rened through compositions of model transformations, by propa- gating changes in the artifacts over transformations bidirectionally. How- ever, it is often difficult to understand the correspondence among ele- ments of the artifacts such as to which part in the source an edit on the view is to be propagated. It is equally hard to predict whether an edit is propagable to the source, if the edit affects other parts in the target, or where in the transformation should be changed to accommodate the edit. These issues are critical for more complex transformations. In this paper, we propose an approach to analyzing the above correspondence as well as to classifying edges according to their editability on the target, in a compositional framework of bidirectional graph transformation. These are achieved by augmenting the forward semantics of the transforma- tions with explicit correspondence traces. By leveraging this approach, it is possible to solve the above issues, without executing the entire back- ward transformation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach via GUI using non-trivial transformations.