Automated Scoping, Validation and Quickfixes for xText based languages

By Christian Beikov, Raphael Löffler, Oliver Reiter and Christopher Schwarz.

Xtext is a language development framework and mostly used to create domain specific languages as well as to develop feature-rich editors. Model validation with error highlighting, scoping and quick fixes are also supported, but have to be implemented manually. Our project generates said features automatically based on OCL constraints, which are defined in the underlying model of the language. The goal is to reduce the amount of work creating textual editors for DSLs by following a model based approach. In cause of the fact that the whole work is based on Xtext, a big part of it was to explore Xtext to find possible solutions for integrating the described automated approach. Xtext is one part of the openArchitectureWare (oAW), which is framework for supporting model driven development. The possibility to not only create a new DSL, but also create automatically specified editors for this DSL makes Xtext very interesting. Another big part were our work is based on is the Object Constraint Language (OCL). OCL is a textual formal specification language and is part of the Unified Modeling Language. It is a declarative language and was introduced by the Object Management Group (OMG) to add the possibility of adding constraints to object-oriented models that can not be defined with standard diagrammatic notations.

Validation

For each class, which has OCL constraints defined, a validator is generated in Java, which also tries to find the erroneous feature of the object. These are further used in a custom implementation of AbstractDeclarativeValidator to be used in an Xtext editor. The improvement to the default validation is the localization of the error, which also enables the possibility to provide quickfixes. The pictures below show our implementation (Fig. 2.) in comparison to the default validator (Fig. 1.), which highlights the complete, invalid object.

Fig. 1. Error highlighting with default validators

Fig. 2. Error highlighting with OCL validators

Scoping

A scoping provider basically returns a set of objects, which can be used in a specific context. Therefore scoping rules have to be implemented manually, as the default provider only generates a scope with objects of a valid type. Our project tries to filter these by the OCL constraints of the context. To give an example, Fig. 4. shows the filtered scope in comparison to the unfiltered one (Fig. 3.). A constraint hereby is, that a page element, e.g. a text-field, can only refer to features contained in the handled entity of the form. In this example, this is Event. Another one in this example is, that a date-selection-field can only refer to attributes of the type Date and therefore the other elements are filtered out.

Fig. 3. Scope of the default validator

Fig. 4. Scope of the OCL based validator

Quickfixes

Quickfixes are provided by the editor, if an error is detected. For cross references, this is basically just the combination of validation and scoping, but for primitive data types, these have to be provided seperately. Our implementation detects the type of the erroneous feature and generates a fix at runtime in the validator. There is currently just one limitation: quickfixes are provided only for boolean values and cross references, but this functionality can easily be extended in the future.

Fig. 5. Quickfix of the OCL based provider

Future work

Of course there are some restrictions and limits of our implementation, which can be improved in future. Especially the generated Java code can be optimized in future. As mentioned our generated quickfixes currently support only boolean values. The code generation can be extended in future to also provide other types. Another way to extend our solution is to integrate all OCL operations. Currently we only implemented the most important ones to provide basic functionality of the implementation. These two extensions can be easily introduced by extending the implementation for the wanted functionality.


The source code of the project can be found on Github (https://github.com/Advanced-Model-Engineering-SS16/xtext-ocl-extensions).