[Uml-devel] Re: Uml-devel digest, Vol 1 #309 - 4 msgs

[Brian Thomas]

On Tuesday 28 January 2003 03:13 pm, JR wrote:
> There isn't one.  XMI is a difficult standard to follow and we don't do it
> very well.  I'd be curious to know how well Rational or Together or the
> like do it.
>
> The latest version of XMI is 1.2 I think but it's DTD does seem to say
> version 1.1 which is strange, but probably our bug.
>

	Yeah, I just queried the OMG people (Linda Heaton) and apparently the linked document
	under the 1.2 XMI spec is really the older 1.1 one. Newer documents are 
	currently not available publically, so it might make sense to have umbrello
	use the 1.1 spec of XMI. 

> The 1.3 is the version of UML.  It could be upped to 1.4 if you wish.
>

	Yeah, I think that umbrello should use the most recent, stable, version of the
	specs.

> There are probably numberous places where the file format could be updated
> to be more XMI compliant which would be great (so long as we retained the
> possibility to load Umbrello 1.1 files).

	Hmm. Within a version of Umbrello I might agree that the priority is backwards
	compatability, but from what I can tell, much is badly out of spec and will require
	some serious surgery to reach compliance. Perhaps version 2.0 of umbrello can
	make a point of achieving compliance with XMI spec 1.1 rather than be able to read
	the older umbrello 1.1 series save files. Compliance in umbrello 1.2  might be possible if there
	is something distinctive between the older XMI files and the newer ones, such as a 
	DOCTYPE declaration with the umbrello DTD in it (which I assume is inheriting from the
	XMI one). (For those of you wondering why an umbrello DTD is needed instead of just
	the XMI one, it is because (I assume) certain declarations like "FloatingText" arent in the 
	XMI spec and must be added in by an inheriting DTD, eg. the umbrello DTD).

									-b.t.