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Best Model-to-text transformation tool [message #1830448]

Sun, 26 July 2020 14:22

Denny Sbanchi

Messages: 4
Registered: July 2020

Junior Member

Hi everybody,
I'm working with some .xmi files that defines the structure of a certain model, but I'm new to this kind of stuff.
I've to transform the model described by the xmi file in an xml structured file with another stucture that I already know.

I've seen something about Acceleo or Xtend, but I find quite difficult to decide which is better than the other, can you help me finding the differences between them or tell me if you know other tools that could be interesting to use for reaching my goal.

Thanks to everyone who will answer my question.

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Re: Best Model-to-text transformation tool [message #1830460 is a reply to message #1830448]

Mon, 27 July 2020 06:55

Ed Willink

Messages: 7655
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi

You ask this on the M2T group, but refer to 'another structure' which to me implies a model so you should perhaps look at an M2M tool such as ATL, Epsilon, QVT, Viatra, ...

For M2T the choice is now hard

JET is very old, and was a bit klunky, but its recent addition of a useful Xtext-based editor mitigates much of the ugliness. As a critical part of the EMF support, JET has good long term prospects. (Do not get confused by JET2 which is dead).

Acceleo is based on the MOFM2T standard, and so should be your first choice. However it is now in long term maintenance, unfortunately with a number of serious difficulties outstanding.

Xtend was my preferred choice, to which I migrated from Acceleo, but Xtend is now under threat of deprecation.

Regards

Ed Willink

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Re: Best Model-to-text transformation tool [message #1830474 is a reply to message #1830460]

Mon, 27 July 2020 13:30

Denny Sbanchi

Messages: 4
Registered: July 2020

Junior Member

Thank you Ed, your answer was very clear!
Specifically I'm going to deal with an XML2XML tranformaton, I found that exists also a Model-to-Model tranformation tool that is ATL.
In you opinion, operating with XMI files, would be a better choice starting with XTend or elaborate on ATL?
For a newbie like me it's hard to understand which benefits could I take from each of them.

Denny Sbanchi

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Re: Best Model-to-text transformation tool [message #1830486 is a reply to message #1830474]

Mon, 27 July 2020 18:13

Ed Willink

Messages: 7655
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

Hi

If XML2XML is your intent then you really do not want to use M2T since you will have to construct all the XML the hard way.

If you mean XMI2XMI then that is what M2M tools do out of the box.

If you really mean XML2XML then that is harder. ATL used to support it, but bit rot set in many years ago. A couple of years ago I investigated and produced a 'standard' XML model that allows your favourite M2M tool to do XML2XML. See [1], which although about using an M2M for M2T also explains how an M2M can do XML2XML by installing at least org.eclipse.qvtd.xml from the QVTd project.

Regards

Ed Willink

[1] http://www.eclipse.org/mmt/qvt/docs/OCL2018TextM2M/TextM2M.pdf

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