Automatic Generation Of Graphical Editors From Graphical Notation Specifications

Sammanfattning: The use of graphical editors in model-driven engineering has increased as they simplify the design of domain systems by allowing users to manipulate elements using diagrams. This helps developers by elaborating systems and making them easier to analyze with visual representations and with less coding. The increased complexity of domains and their respective graphical editors has led to the invasion of frameworks that can be used to design these graphical editors. Eclipse Sirius is an open-source framework mainly acclimated for defined domain-specific language users to create graphical editors that help elaborate and analyze domains with complex architectures. Besides the advantages of using Sirius, developing a functional graphical editor in Sirius involves people with different skills like domain experts, editor architects, and developers, which decreases the efficiency of the developers and increases the cost. Additionally, both developers and end-users of these editors require Sirius knowledge which is difficult and time-consuming to learn. This process also has the developers perform repetitive manual tasks to include all domain details, making the process error-prone. This thesis proposes an approach that automatizes the generation of graphical editors that will reduce the manual effort required and reduce the errors that developers are prone to. This solution is based on the Sirius editor framework and evaluated using three use cases where we compare the manually defined and automatically generated graphical editors. Metamodels provide basic information and provide the language that the graphical editor is based on, while annotations provide more detailed information. As part of this work, we also present a specification guide that guides users through the annotation process for any meta-model, as well as a demonstration of model-to-text transformations that are used to generate a functional editor automatically.