Support for dynamically typed EObjects (UML profiles)

viatra / EMF-IncQuery

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Support for dynamically typed EObjects (UML profiles) #199

Closed istvanrath closed 11 years ago

istvanrath commented 12 years ago

In order to properly support profiled/stereotyped UML models, we need to support dynamically typed EObjects (i.e. EObjects whose EClass is instantiated at runtime).

first, we need to specify how such constructs could be supported by the pattern language
second, the runtime engine (including IQBase) needs to be made aware of such things, to support their matching in an incremental way.

bergmanngabor commented 12 years ago

I think #95 is a logical prerequisite.

ujhelyiz commented 11 years ago

There are two different cases to explore:

UML Profile
Dynamic EMF (e.g. in context of Xcore)

Goal: having a Base feature/object listener for dynamic EMF elements.

okrosa commented 11 years ago

Postmeeting conclusions (i.e. mainly tasks for me):

First try out the current system with a fully-dynamic example, from java code. Create patterns from dynamic classes, and run them on dynamic elements. Result should be that everything works well.
Second, look further into the uml problems, as we might need a specific solution for them.
Third: look into the xtext scoping, and compare it with the proposed "packageNsUri#eclassName" string signature based IQBase refactor.

okrosa commented 11 years ago

Some notes:

The fully dynamic case works correctly on a small testcase. I can even add it to the current testcases, I do not know if it tests any previously untested part of the system, but at least it is a different approach.
I tried editing some parts of an ecore while a dynamic instance of it is loaded in the reflective editor. Adding an extra attribute results in an error in the reflective editor. Removing is handled correctly. This whole approach is based on luck as far as I can see, so I just want to ensure that we should not deal with changing dynamic metamodels.

bergmanngabor commented 11 years ago

Food for thought: perhaps in the future we can apply a "defensive barrier" to dynamic EPackages if EIQ uses them as metamodels. This protective component would listen on changes to the metamodel - much the same way as IQBase listens on the instance model - and do something (throw an exception / kill the EIQ engine / whatever) as soon as someone tries to change the metamodel. I think this will help us catch nasty problems that would otherwise arise, and it adds little performance overhead, since the metamodel is not normally expected to change.

okrosa commented 11 years ago

Closed, moved to Eclipse bugzilla. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=398874