overview.adoc

Overview

This asset contains extensions to the odesign editor providing Xtext-enabled text entry fields.

Xtext-enabled editors provide the usual Xtext features: syntax highlighting, auto completion, validation, etc.

The Xtext language does not need to be modified to be used in the editor (except for [advancedCapabilities]).

The text entry fields can be placed

• either inside a Sirius diagram (direct editors; directEdit)

• or in the Sirius properties view (widgets; property).

The contents of the editors can be retrieved from two sources:

• A semantic element of a model that’s used as input to the diagram (model). In this case, we may set additional options:

  • limit the set of editableFeatures,

  • ignore some nested features (ignoredNestedFeatures).

  • specify which features should be pre-selected when showing the Xtext editor (selectedFeatures).

  • specify which terminals should be included before and after the edited text (prefixTerminals / suffixTerminals).

• A String feature of a semantic element (value). In this case, we may supply additional information if we wanted to edit an incomplete model:

  • text (hidden from the end-user) to be pre-pended (prefixText),

  • text (hidden from the end-user) to be appended (suffixText).

For model-based directEdit editors, if the model element is an edge, the affected label must be set (edgeLabelPosition).

An editor can display

• either single-line contents (singleLine),

• or multi-line contents (multiLine).

For all editors, we can set:

• whether validation errors should be allowed (cancelOnValidationError)

• whether an formatter should be applied (enableFormatter)

For all editors, we need to provide

• An injector to access the Xtext language to use (injector).

All of this can be summarized in one table:

	property	directEdit		add. info [info]
model	singleLine	singleLine	edgeLabelPosition	prefixTerminals suffixTerminals
	multiLine	multiLine
value	singleLine	singleLine		prefixText suffixText
	multiLine	multiLine
add. info [info]		editableFeatures, ignoredNestedFeatures selectedFeatures		for all: injector cancelOnValidationError enableFormatter

As advanced capabilities,

• the editor might use a different grammar (a.k.a. Xtext language) for editing model contents than the one used for serialization;

• we can force the serialization of whitespaces if our formatter does not work as expected;

• the serializer can force ignored nested features to be transient;

• we can constrain the editor’s global Scope to all Ecore resources from the Sirius session.

Packaging

we provide two different Eclipse features:

• com.altran.general.integration.xtextsirius.design.feature contains all Eclipse plug-ins required to edit the Xtext-enabled entry fields in the odesign editor. It also contains the runtime feature below.

• com.altran.general.integration.xtextsirius.runtime.feature contains all Eclipse plug-ins required at runtime to use the Xtext-enabled entry fields in a diagram (or associated property view).