You are welcome to discuss the proposal in the GMF newsgroup. When creating a new thread please prefix the subject with “[GenGMF]“.

The current stable version of Epsilon seems to be a bit buggy. Please use the version which is available from SVN or the interim update site.

My name is Attila Bak and i have decided to support the GenGMF project because i think having an easy-to-understand, configurable generation tool for GMF is really challenging and GenGMF tackles this problem in an elegant way with oAW transformations.

To myself: I have been commiting into the Fornax oAW projects and TextUML for some time now and am an oAW fan. I am relatively new to GMF but hope to get deeper understanding soon and contribute as much as possible to this project.

Cheers,

attila

Welcome Attila!

ElementTypeTransformator ()

The ElementTypeTransformator is called during the copy process of the Template and allows to modify the type of an element contained in the Template. The new type needs to be assignment compatible to the containment reference of the old element. All attributes and references will be migrated if the feature is part of common base class. The Wizard will ask you for compatible type replacements.

Example: In a NodeTemplate is a “Rectangle” defined as main figure element. With the ElementTypeTransformator you can make it a “RoundedRectangle”, a “Circle” or any other Figure as long the resulting EObject’s EClass is derived from the GMFGraph Figure EClass.

ColorTransformator ()

With the ColorTransformator you can specify the foreground or background color of a Figure element. The color will be set after the Template contents have been copied for the Descriptor. The Wizard will ask you for rgb or predefined constant colors.

Example: A Figure element in a NodeTemplate has no color set and therefore will be drawn in the resulting editor black-on-white. To make the editor elements a bit more catchy the background color for each referencing Descriptor needs to be set to a different value. In the ColorTransformator you can specify the figure, a background and a foreground color.

StaticTextTransformator ()

Templates may contain a static text field which is not bound to a feature. The StaticTextTransfromator allows you to enter a specific text for a descriptor. The Wizard will let you change the default text.

Example: You have an abstract Entity class and some derived ones (e.g. a LocalEntity and a PersistedEntity). You want to use an already defined template which contains a static label for showing the ClassName enclosed in guillemots. Additionally you want to customize the static label to show “Entity” instead of “PersistedEntity” because this is the default case.

On the descriptor for your “PersistedEntity” use the wizard to change the static text, select the label you want to change and enter a new text.

The StaticTextTransformator has been introduced in Version 2.1!

ScriptTransformator ()

The ScriptTransformator can be used to apply arbitrary changes to the generated GMFGraph or GMFMap models. Internally they are used to support the deprecated PostProcessor functions from the 1.0 version. Because a Wizard cannot guess the script you want there is no one.

Example: You want to add a label with a fixed text to an editor element. The rest of the node should look as in the Template specified. To do that you can add a ScriptTransformator in the Descriptor and specify a function name from a Xtend script. The script file itself needs to be referenced from the “Model” root element in the “Post Proc Transformator Ext” attribute.

The first part (issue 4.2009, p.48) of the article series is about Templates, Descriptors and how to create them using Wizards.

In the second part (issue 5.2009, p.84) the focus is on Compartments as well as Transformators to give the nodes and edges a specific outfit.

To get involved with GenGMF we will start with a fresh Eclipse installation to make sure that every step in the tutorial can be executed the same way. You are free to run the tutorial on your own Eclipse distribution. If something goes wrong you can return to this step and download a fresh one.

We will start with the modeling distribution of Eclipse. Download the appropriate version for your system from the site below.

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-modeling-tools-includes-incubating-components/galileor

After starting Eclipse we need an SVN client. We are using Subversive but if you like to you can of course use SubClipse.

Because Subversive is not included in a fresh installation we need to install it. Choose “Help / Install Software” and insert subversive in the following dialog.

For additional information please read to the subversive installation guide:

http://www.eclipse.org/subversive/documen…Subversive/install.php

Import the GenGMF sources

After restarting Eclipse go to the SVN Perspective and add a new repository location with the url https://gengmf.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gengmf.

Go into the trunk and select all projects not ending in “.feature” or “.update-site” and also not the demo directory. Check out the projects using the context menu.

After downloading the source you will see a workspace with looks like the following one.

Installing additional dependencies

Now the workspace contains a lot of errors. You might ask “Why the hell do we checkout such a workspace?”. The answer is, that solving this problems will give you quite a good feeling which components are used by GenGMF.

openArchitectureWare

GenGMF relies heavily on openArchitectureWare. So we will install the latest Version of it form the current update site:

http://www.openarchitectureware.org/updatesite/milestone/4.3.1/p2/

TO create the new update site copy the url to the “work with:” input menu on the p2 install manage and click add.

Install it, re-launch the platform and you will see that a lot of problems will be solved.

AspectJ

Next we need to install AspectJ. This can be done from the following update site.

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/35/update

Epsilon

Now we need to install epsilon. Again we will need to create a new update site.

http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/gmt/epsilon/updates/site.xml

COPE

You now can see that the most errors are gone. Only wrong interpreted oAW errors and an unsatisfied dependencies to COPE remain. To solve the cope problem:

http://cope.in.tum.de/update-site/site.xml

Groovy

Groovy is needed by COPE so we need to install it too using the following update site:

http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.5/

Run GenGMF

Now run a n new Eclipse instance. But run it without the demo projects!

The plug-in to go through the article and the completed version.

Is GenGMF compatible with Eclipse Galileo?

Currently the SVN HEAD revision is compatible with Eclipse Galileo. The last revision compatible to Eclipse Ganymede is 61.