I’m wondering if you have in plans providing OCL editor for VP.
Building precise models requires frequent use of OCL expression. Without advanced support for consistency checking (model element names changes) it quikly becomes a nightmare making this useful technique not efficient. It is possible to use third-party products for that purpose, but in most of the cases it would require exporting the model to XMI, which is also not good solution.
So, any help from VP will be appreciated in this area.
Thank yoy for your answer. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for the “right” decission, as manual finding and correction of “pure text” takes a lot of time.
I remember you mentioned to let me know…but to make sure you did not forget - are there any known plans to build OCL editor ? It is hardly impossible to precisely model any system without OCL and having no consistency checks makes ocl-ing painful.
It’s been a long time since our last conversation. Do you remember Jick (me)?
Could you describe more about the OCL Editor that you want us to develop? How to trigger it and what will be the functions? I do not know much about OCL. I usually use it in note shape, but not intensively…
I hope that you may share your expectation with us so that I can discuss with our teammates in further (with more information). Hopefully we can give you a reply within a week or two.
Good to see (? )you again and thank you for quick response.
Just to give you an idea of what I have in mind, I’ll compare OCL Editor with IDE (for example Visual Studio). First, you can select a class/object from given context, then you can select available features (properties/methods). This level of support would greatly improve working with ocl. Using “.” (dots) to navigate through associations would be very useful.
Another very important feature (even more important than the one above) would be consistency checks. Suppose you have class named Customer that you used in many constraints definition. And one day you rename it to Client. It would be good if ocl tool replace the name of the class in these constraints or at leas reported the constraints that need attention/correction. The same applies for other model elements that can appear in ocl expressions.
Hope this gives the idea. Please let me know if there’s anything more I should provide.
Just to add my quick thoughts: I currently use the documentation space to add OCL constraints and for redundancy (and easier spotting), I add a note showing the constraint near the relevant entities. Personally, that is sufficient for my needs. “Intellisense” and refactoring as Artur described would be a nice feature to have.
Jick, to add to the trigger suggestion, I believe the OCL editor would be invoked from the entity of context either through the resource-centric icons or the context menu.
Having reviewed your suggestions, we will try to support OCL Editor in the release that will be available in June. If there are any changes, I will post here.
In the meantime I have examined new features of adding Model elements to HTML text fields. It improves defining ocl expression by maintaining a link between model element and its names contained in text. Would it be a big problem to extend the set of model elements types that can be selected to include attributes, operations and roles ?
Thanks for replying. At the moment we do not support selecting class members when add element in HTML documentation, but I’ve passed to our engineers to study the possibility to support this.
Would you mind to further clarify your meaning of “roles”? Thanks!
Thanks for your clarification. Our engineers will study the feasibility to support inserting roles of classes to documentation, and I’ll let you know once there is any news.
And I would like to let you know that we have enhanced to select attributes/operations in Documentation (see attached image). Please run “VP Suite Update” to update to latest patch (sp1_20100317g or later). Details about updating to latest patch are available at:
I would like to inform you that in the latest build you can insert role (i.e. association end) as a link in documentation. If you are not running the latest build you can run the update program (in VP-Suite-install-dir\bin) to upgrade to it.
