Abstract
Spreadsheets play an important role in software organizations. Indeed, in large software organizations, spreadsheets are not only used to define sheets containing data and formulas, but also to collect information from different systems, to adapt data coming from one system to the format required by another, to perform operations to enrich or simplify data, etc. In fact, over time many spreadsheets turn out to be used for storing and processing increasing amounts of data and supporting increasing numbers of users. Unfortunately, spreadsheet systems provide poor support for modularity, abstraction, and transformation, thus, making the maintenance, update and evolution of spreadsheets a very complex and error-prone task.
We present techniques for model-driven spreadsheet engineering where we employ bidirectional transformations to maintain spreadsheet models and instances synchronized. In our setting, the business logic of spreadsheets is defined by ClassSheet models to which the spreadsheet data conforms, and spreadsheet users may evolve both the model and the data instances. Our techniques are implemented as part of the MDSheet framework: an extension for a traditional spreadsheet system.
This work is funded by the ERDF through the Programme COMPETE and by the Portuguese Government through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, projects ref. PTDC/EIA-CCO/108613/2008 and PTDC/EIA-CCO/120838/2010. The three first authors were also supported by FCT grants SFRH/BPD/73358/2010, SFRH/BPD/46987/2008 and BI4-2011PTDC/EIA-CCO/108613/2008, respectively.
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Cunha, J., Fernandes, J.P., Mendes, J., Pacheco, H., Saraiva, J. (2012). Bidirectional Transformation of Model-Driven Spreadsheets. In: Hu, Z., de Lara, J. (eds) Theory and Practice of Model Transformations. ICMT 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7307. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30476-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30476-7_7
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