[Uml-devel] Data types and codegenerators

[BARTKO, Zoltan]

Dear Developers of the Fair Country of Umbrello,

I have a need to develop a SQL-code generator for Umbrello. There is one,
and yes, I do help Nikolaus Gradwohl (the original author) with it.

Since SQL is mostly different than Java, Cpp, or any object-oriented
language, even if PostgreSQL claims to be an ORDBMS, (My final year project
I am working on was designed in UML and the backend should be written in
SQL) I was thinking of the following:

* Add the possibility of switching sets of types with "a flick of the wrist"
and be able to choose the set of types that should appear in the pull-down
lists when defining the types of attributes and operators:

    * UML default
    * Java
    * Cpp
    * SQL
    * etc.

Advantages/Disadvantages:

+ Anyone can choose the appropriate set of types anytime (e.g. the fans of
Qt may use QString right away, without having to define it as a class and I
can stop manually overwriting string to, say, varchar(64)).

- Once everyone uses the respective type sets for a particular language, the
design will be language-dependent and therefore limited to that particular
language (and I will have trouble converting 'money' from SQL to Java.)

If you are willing to undertake this, I am willing to implement it. I would
like to hear the opinions of the people, who wrote the respective code
generators, since it would greatly affect their work.

Cheers (Keep the Faith)

Zoltan