semantics of famix reference - Moose-dev

8 Jul 2016

Hi,

While loading one of my existing models, I remarked that the semantics of
FAMIXReference have been changed: earlier it was an association between two
containers and hence much more permissive. Now it is an association between
a method (from side) and a type (to side).

Although I agree that the semantics are clearer, sometimes we have the need
to represent an association/dependency between two entities. It happens
because we are reading from a abstracted source of information (e.g. a
description of the model from a modelling tool) that does not have the
code-level details.

So it will be good to have a more generic dependency. Hence, the question:

1. Does it make sense to add a generic dependency (between two containers?
sourced entities?)?
2. Should it be named FAMIXDependency as the word dependency can have
different meanings to different people (all dependencies of an entity may
be its "computed" dependencies from the dependencies of its children or
aggregate of all types of dependencies e.g. accesses, invocations, etc.).
So, we need to be careful about the naming.

With moose-chef, I would have to tell which entities have this dependency
for correct computation of the dependencies but with MooseQuery, we should
not have this problem because this information is inferred from the
meta-model, right?

regards.

Usman