Abstract
In order to make explicit and tangible their design choices , software developers integrate, in their applications’ models, constraints that their models and their implementations should satisfy. Various environments enable constraint checking during the modeling stage, but in most cases they do not generate code that would enable the checking of these constraints during the implementation stage. It turns out that this is possible in a number of cases. Environments that provide this functionality only offer it for functional constraints (related to the states of objects in applications) and not for architectural ones (related to the structure of applications). Considering this limitation, we describe in this paper a system that generates metaprograms starting from architecture constraints, written in OCL at the metamodel level, and associated to a specific UML model of an application. These metaprograms enable the checking of these constraints at runtime.
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Notes
- 1.
We assume in this paper that the reader is familiar with UML and Java languages. This is the reason why the two metamodels are not detailed. They are depicted only for accompanying OCL constraints in order to see how navigations in the metamodels are established.
- 2.
We use getDeclaredField() instead of getFields() to retrieve all attributes (private and public). For those we inherit, we must specify them in the OCL constraint using the role superClass.
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Kallel, S., Tibermacine, C., Tramoni, B., Dony, C., Kacem, A.H. (2016). Automatic Translation of OCL Meta-Level Constraints into Java Meta-Programs. In: Lee, R. (eds) Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking and Parallel/Distributed Computing 2015. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23509-7_15
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