[Uml-devel] more u2 update

[Andrew Sutton]

On Saturday 22 March 2003 10:22 am, Sebastian Stein wrote:
> Andrew Sutton <ansutton at kent.edu> [030322 14:22]:
> > just in case somebody feels like building it and running it :)
>
> Yes, I care!!! I returned this week and I'm trying to get up to date with
> all the things happened (have to read 1300 mails). This will take some
> time. Maybe I can support you by testing. Any ideas what I should do?
>
> Steinchen

i thought we'd lost you ;)

help? what's that... just kidding. i'm kind of in the middle of doing the 
crappy grunt work that services everything else so there's not a whole lot to 
do until we start getting the view framework in place - and that's another 
weird issue.

there is something that i wanted to do - but i don't have time because i'm 
starting to do research on uml visualization - lots and lots of research. 
ugh. i want to make a metamodel viewer that plugs into a gui application. i 
haven't really set up the framework for how this would work yet. i'm thinking 
it should be a standard plugin (see plugins/storage/xmi for an example) 
except i want to create a new plugin category so we can have the following:
u2/
	plugins/
		storage/
		metamodel/
		visual/	<-- metamodel view goes here

i think the metamodel view should be conditionally loaded by the model-1.4 
plugin - if there's a GUI it gets loaded, otherwise it doesn't. this is 
configuration issue, so no code is required. on initialization, the plugin 
should grab the menu bar and insert a new submenu into the view menu (do we 
have a view menu?). lets call the sub menu "metamodels". for each metamodel 
currently loaded by the system, we could have a menu item. clicking on one of 
these would then launch the metamodel view.

the metamodel view is basically a tree view. the hierarchy can be constructed 
on the Namespace::contents attribute to show containment. if we had a split 
window, we could show some interesting information on the right half of the 
window.

so... here's the stuff that's not in place for creating this:
	- the visual plugin category
	- the metamodel viewer plugin (lets call it "mmview" with the actual library 
named "libu2_mmview")
	- libumbrello2 knowledge of plugin categories. we'd need to modify plugin 
loader to put references to plugins into various categories so the 
application or other plugins can use them
	- a general framework for modifying the application menu bar
	- other stuff as it occurs

this turns out to be a great way to test the capabilities of metamodel 
implementations and the XMI parser. we can use that view to validate the 
correctness of parsing.

that sounds like good fun :)

andy