Automatic generation of consistency-preserving edit operations for MDE tools
Michaela Rindt, Timo Kehrer, Udo Kelter · 2014
Abstract. Many tools for Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) which are based on the widespread Eclipse Modelling Framework (EMF) [4] are de-veloped for single tasks like e.g., generating, editing, refactoring, merging, patching or viewing of models. Thus, models are oftentimes exchanged in a series of tools. In such a tool chain, a grafical model editor or viewer usually sets the degree of well-formedness of a model in order to visualize it. Well-formedness rules are typically defined in the meta-models, yet not all tools take them into account. As a result, a model can become un-processable for other tools. This leads to the requirement, that all tools should be based on a common definition of minimum consistency. An obvious solution for this challenge is to use a common library of consistency-preserving edit operations (CPEOs) for models. However, typical meta-models lead to a large number of CPEOs. Manually spec-ifying and implementing such a high number of CPEOs is hardly fea-sible and prone to error. This paper presents a new meta-tool which generates a complete set of CPEOs for a given meta-model. We have successfully integrated the generated CPEOs in several developer tools. The video