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Include Xtext document formating as model elements [message #1730288]

Sat, 23 April 2016 15:34

Stephan Seifermann

Messages: 19
Registered: March 2015

Junior Member

Dear all,

I am looking for a way to store the formating information of an Xtext file as part of the model representation. Thereby, the textual representation could be recreated completely from the XMI serialized model.

What I could think of is either a separate layout model that refers to the model elements or a reference to a layout model element that stores such layout information. The former approach is used by GMF editors, the latter is the approach the guys from EMFText are using (see their manual, section 4.2.14).

Is there any possibility of including this information in an Xtext model as well? If not, what would be a good starting point for integrating such a feature?

Best regards
Stephan

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Re: Include Xtext document formating as model elements [message #1730289 is a reply to message #1730288]

Sat, 23 April 2016 15:43

Christian Dietrich

Messages: 14665
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

I dont get the point about this. There is no formatting information. The is the concrete syntax and the ast. For the concrete syntax a so called node model tree is created. Maybe you can use https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/blob/4e5a6842d937c9616dcf920e7b3fee9b8a6e0687/plugins/org.eclipse.xtext/src/org/eclipse/xtext/nodemodel/serialization/SerializationUtil.java to serialize it separately but why not simply keeping the text file if it already has all information needed.

Maybe you can give more insights on your usecase

Twitter : @chrdietrich
Blog : https://www.dietrich-it.de

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Re: Include Xtext document formating as model elements [message #1730310 is a reply to message #1730289]

Sun, 24 April 2016 09:44

Stephan Seifermann

Messages: 19
Registered: March 2015

Junior Member

Hello Christian,

thanks for your fast response. You are right, my motiviation for including such information did not become clear.

What I would like to realize is storing the Xtext model in a CDO repository, so I can use its abilities such as change notifications. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to store the Xtext model as model and not as text file (which is also supported by CDO). The approach of Stefan Winkler for incremental model upgrades seems promising. Nevertheless, the approach lacks support for restoring the formatting of the document from CDO as this is not part of the model and therefore not stored.

Obviously, I could store the Xtext file as text resource in addition to the model in CDO and apply some synchronization mechanisms but this could become quite hard if the underlying model has been modified in CDO by a mechanism different from the Xtext editor. This is, however, crucial for my use case. Instead, I would like to be able to completely reconstruct the textual representation from the model stored in CDO.

As far as I understand your answer, the data structure containing the information about the textual representation is only available temporarily and not stored in a EMF-like model. I would have to serialize the node model and feed it back to Xtext when the regular model is loaded. I will have a look at this.

Thanks
Stephan

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