Access to vpp file without opening Visual Paradigm

General Questions/Discussions
1

Hi!

Is there any way to access vpp file content without opening the project? We need to create the tool that shoud search .vpp files being placed in svn repository for some information.

Best, Artur

2

Hello Artur,

If you have the Modeler Edition or above, you could convert the VPP file to XMI or XML (=the whole information from the VPP file) and process this. For very simple tasks you may even get away without parsing the XMI/XML as XML but using simple text pattern matching instead.

There’s also a Java API to access a VP-UML model but I don’t know if VP-UML has to run as a GUI to access the model information.

Stefan

3

you can just unzip the vpp file, inside it you will find a directory structure of text (mainly xml) files.

4

That’s true, but as the VPP file contains a lot of directories and files I think it’s usually much easier to use the exported XML or XMI file. The advantage of unpacking the VPP file is of course that it works with any VP-UML edition whereas exporting XML or XMI requires at least the Modeler Edition. One disadvantage of using the VPP file is that its format probably will be less stable than the “official” export formats.

Stefan

5

Hi Stefan,

Thank you for the prompt on accessing XMI file. However I rather need to access the model content without conversion, as we’ll be searching in bulk quantities of model.

Rain, Jick…any comments ?

Best regards, Artur

6

Hi Artur,

I’m neither Rain nor Jick, but still … :slight_smile:

It’s also possible to convert a project file to an XML file (other than an XMI file). As far as I can tell, the XML file should contain all information that’s present in the VPP file. There’s also a command line tool to generate this XML format.

What do you mean by “bulk quantities of model”, by the way? Or did you mean, you want to search many models (“bulk quantities of models”?). In that case you’re probably right in dismissing the conversion paths as the command line conversions in my experience are painfully slow. I assume that’s mostly due to the startup time of the Java virtual machine.

If that’s the case, I suggest to allow multiple VPP file paths as arguments to the conversion commands. This would also help one of my applications (here for the XMI conversion though).

Rain, Jick, any chance to see this implemented? :slight_smile:

Stefan