Hi all
I am a student at the University of Bern and for my Master's Thesis I am using the FAMIX metamodel and I also intend to use Fame.
One thing that is most valuable for me is the possibility to generate metamodel stub code from an fm3 mse file, in my case Java classes.
While filling in the stub classes for FAMIX core, I realized that much of that work could also be done by the generator, if only it had some additional information. So I suggest adding that information as pragmas.
Let me explain that on behalf of an example.
The message FAMIXNamedEntity>>belongsTo should be overridden in all of
FAMIXType FAMIXScopingEntity FAMIXMethod FAMIXFunction FAMIXLocalVariable FAMIXUnknownVariable FAMIXGlobalVariable FAMIXParameter FAMIXAttribute FAMIXImplicitVariable (and more outside FAMIX core)
but a code generator does not know that, so I have to implement the corresponding messages/methods by hand. That is a bit annoying since this really is very simple code that could easily be generated. Example for one of the methods that have to be written by hand:
FAMIXAttribute>>belongsTo ^ self parentType
Every implementation of 'belongsTo' looks like that, i.e. is a very simple delegate, or let us call it an "alias".
I suggest to add the information about such "aliases" to the pragmas:
1) add <alias> to NamedEntity>>belongsTo 2) add <aliasedBy #belongsTo> to all subclass properties, e.g. to FAMIXAttribute>>parentType
Then, with that kind of information in an mse file, a code generator could do more work for me and I had time to drink an additional coffee or two :)
And maybe metamodel browsers can profit from that kind of information, too.
Cheers, Raffael Krebs