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UML2 report generation [message #376858]

Fri, 01 June 2007 16:13

Dave Carlson

Messages: 402
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

All,
I am exploring the availability, requirements, and interest in an MDT
subproject for UML2 model report generation. Output formats would need
to include at least HTML and PDF, and extensive customization must be
possible for filtering model content to be reported.

I am working with a group of healthcare industry users and am searching
for an open source solution, or ideally an open source solution that
includes related commercial support and extensions. MDT seems like a
natural home for this capability.

Does anyone know of existing report generators for Eclipse UML2 that
could be leveraged? I admit to little knowledge of BIRT, but have not
found any info on if/how it can be applied for designing reports of UML
model content. Anyone with ideas or experience for using BIRT with UML?

Regards,
Dave Carlson

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Re: UML2 report generation [message #376859 is a reply to message #376858]

Mon, 04 June 2007 12:51

Florian Georg

Messages: 27
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

Dave,

I would suggest BIRT as the reporting engine, as you could benefit from
things like the the report designer and the various output formats
supported.

However, I found that BIRTs "tabular" data metaphor is not a natural fit
for "hierarchical" structured data like UML models (or XML).

Basically there is a XML data source in BIRT which is able to operate on
data that is selected via XPath - I tried this once in order to get
reports out of my model files (which are serialized as XMI), but this
was a bit too cumbersome for me as the UML-XMI is very "verbose" and has
lots of crosss-references.

I would suggest to use a preprocessing transformation to extract the
interesting information from the UML model to a "BIRT friendly" format
(like an easy XML format or even CSV in simple cases) and generate
reports out of BIRT from that data source.

Unfortunatly, JET2 has some limitations regarding the handling of
namespace-prefixes (like xmi:xxx), which is making me troubles at the
moment ... If you're a XSLT guru, that also could be a thing to consider.

Let me know what you think of that.

regards,
Florian

Dave Carlson schrieb:
> All,
> I am exploring the availability, requirements, and interest in an MDT
> subproject for UML2 model report generation. Output formats would need
> to include at least HTML and PDF, and extensive customization must be
> possible for filtering model content to be reported.
>
> I am working with a group of healthcare industry users and am searching
> for an open source solution, or ideally an open source solution that
> includes related commercial support and extensions. MDT seems like a
> natural home for this capability.
>
> Does anyone know of existing report generators for Eclipse UML2 that
> could be leveraged? I admit to little knowledge of BIRT, but have not
> found any info on if/how it can be applied for designing reports of UML
> model content. Anyone with ideas or experience for using BIRT with UML?
>
> Regards,
> Dave Carlson

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Re: UML2 report generation [message #377131 is a reply to message #376858]

Fri, 08 June 2007 17:12

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: carrasco.ModelDrivenDevelopment.co.uk

This sounds also like a question for the eclipse.modeling.m2t (model to text
newsgroup)

An approach we are using is:

Generation of OpenOffice .odt (text) documents from UML2.1 models:
by producing from UML2.1 models, with MOFscript
OpenOffice 2.0 are a flavor of a ".jar" or ".zip" file,
with the main contents in the content.xml and style.xml files inside the
..odt
We include these in the MOFscript templates (taking care of replacing "%"
by an escaped sequence),
then "fill in the blanks" with the UML2.1 content extracted by MOFscript
(kinda OCL) functions.
We generate the content.xml and style.xml,
then "build" (jarring) the complete .odt.

Generation of OpenOffice .odg (graphics) from Topcased diagrams:
export as SVG
batch-convert them into open office .odg
http://www.ipd.uka.de/~hauma/svg-import/

----------
----------

We are in Inception phase,
and for upcoming iterations,
the whole build process should be further automated.

Cheers!
ACV

"Dave Carlson" <dcarlson@xmlmodeling.com> wrote in message
news:f3pgjv$tje$1@build.eclipse.org...
> All,
> I am exploring the availability, requirements, and interest in an MDT
> subproject for UML2 model report generation. Output formats would need to
> include at least HTML and PDF, and extensive customization must be
> possible for filtering model content to be reported.
>
> I am working with a group of healthcare industry users and am searching
> for an open source solution, or ideally an open source solution that
> includes related commercial support and extensions. MDT seems like a
> natural home for this capability.
>
> Does anyone know of existing report generators for Eclipse UML2 that could
> be leveraged? I admit to little knowledge of BIRT, but have not found any
> info on if/how it can be applied for designing reports of UML model
> content. Anyone with ideas or experience for using BIRT with UML?
>
> Regards,
> Dave Carlson

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Re: UML2 report generation [message #377135 is a reply to message #376858]

Thu, 12 July 2007 09:01

Eclipse User

Originally posted by: user.domain.invalid

Dave Carlson wrote:
> All,
> I am exploring the availability, requirements, and interest in an MDT
> subproject for UML2 model report generation. Output formats would need
> to include at least HTML and PDF, and extensive customization must be
> possible for filtering model content to be reported.
>
> I am working with a group of healthcare industry users and am searching
> for an open source solution, or ideally an open source solution that
> includes related commercial support and extensions. MDT seems like a
> natural home for this capability.
>
> Does anyone know of existing report generators for Eclipse UML2 that
> could be leveraged? I admit to little knowledge of BIRT, but have not
> found any info on if/how it can be applied for designing reports of UML
> model content. Anyone with ideas or experience for using BIRT with UML?
>
> Regards,
> Dave Carlson

Depends on what the report is. I have just been using the EMFT Compare
tool to deal with our requirements coming to us as XMI from IBM Rational
6. The compare tool puts out a very usefull emf-diff which I then use to
power an XSLT sheet to give an HTML report wrt "What's changed".

i.e. for many things if one was interested in a persistable solution,
then using XSLT on XMI files may well be the quickest & most adaptable
solution.

Adam

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