[Moose-dev] Re: generic visualizations

Hi Doru, thank you very much for your help. I think that the visualization that shows the pointers between entities should be very interesting to study and generate :) you said that this visualisation is avalaible in: MooseModel>>viewAllEntititesOn: in the MondrianPaintings bundle. I've loaded the last version of Moose (the 3.2.40 version) but I can't find it in the MondrianPaintings bundle! did I do something wrong? thank you sara Hi Sara, I understood that you would want a visualization that would work for any meta-model, but what I did not understand is: What would the goal of the visualization be? What you probably want is some visualization that would just interpret the EMOF description in some way. One generic visualization I can think of is to see what kind of instances are there loaded and how many of each are there. But, this would basically be not much more than the list we show in the browser. Another possibility would be to have all objects in the model, or at least a collection of them, and then show all the pointers between them. I quickly put together this visualization and I attached an example of the LAN model: each node is an entity colored according to its type, and each edge represents a pointer to another entity. The nodes are arranged according to a force based layout (which is very slow). As you can see, the problem here is that even with a small model, you can get complex pictures. The visualization is available in MooseModel>>viewAllEntititesOn: in the MondrianPaintings bundle. Many times the meta-model of the case study and and the meta-model of the visualization are not the same. For example, in a FAMIX meta- model, InheritanceDefinition is a first class, just like Class, but in a class hierarchy visualization, classes are represented as nodes and inheritances as edges. In this case, the naive generic visualization I described above would probably map inheritances on nodes as well. I mentioned Mondrian, because the idea behind it is to provide a kind of an infrastructure with which you can quickly script your visualization to show what you want from the model. With Mondrian you besically specify a meta-model transformation. Cheers, Doru