[SiriusCon 2018] Extensive Use of Custom Properties Views in a Banking DSL Workbench

SIRIUS PROPERTIES VIEW
EXTENSIVE USE OF CUSTOM
PROPERTIES VIEWS IN BANKING DSL
WORKBENCH

PRESENTATION
i-BP & Obeo - Arthur Daussy
 Arthur Daussy <arthur.daussy@obeo.fr>
 Software Engineer @Obeo
 Worked at i-BP for 3.5 years

SUMMARY
Context
User perspective
Technical perspective
Conclusion

HISTORY
 Modelling of the Information System of the « Banque populaire » agencies and web site.
 With MDA, generates:
 Skeleton and data structure for back end
 90% of the front end (Dialog, State machine, etc.).
 The legacy tool was initiated in 2001 – 2002
 Project of this talk
 Migrating from « Rational Rose / UML 1.0 + Visual Basic Extensions » to « Sirius + DSL + Java»

VOLUMES
 Before
 Size in byte: 1,1Go
 Numbers of components: > 1600
 Number of semantic elements: 1.5 M
 System too large for Rational Rose (memory limit) : Edited by chunk
 After
 Size in byte: 400 Mo
 Loading time improved : From 7 min to 20s
 Load entire system for coherence checks

A COMPLEX LANGUAGE
 Epackages: 5
 EClassifiers: 373
 Complex inheritance hierarchy
 Some EClass has 20 super types with several diamond patterns
 Number of EAttributes: 342
 Numbers of EReferences: 405
 One EClass has 42 EStructural features
 An important number of business rules to handle:
 Specific scopes for each references
 Validation
 Creation in cascade

7i-BP & Obeo - Arthur Daussy
USER PERSPECTIVE

BASIC VIEW IS NOT USER FRIENDLY
 Why Use Sirius Properties ? EMF provides this by default ...
 Obvious, right ? But that's not all…
Major risk of
User rejection

TACKLES THE RISK OF ERGONOMY AND PRODUCT ADOPTION
 90% of User's interactions was through custom wizards
 However keep improving user experience: Wizard -> Property view.
Legacy
wizard
Expected

HOW TO DISPLAY NUMEROUS FEATURES
 Filter feature
 Split by category

MAKE DYNAMIC
 Changes of elements in model notifies user of revelant fields.

VALIDATION
 Validation
 Custom validation rules in the VSM
 Use pure EMF validation: Create dynamic

SCOPING
 Scoping rules

COLLABORATIVE WORKFLOW
 100 Developers working in 1600 components in parallel
 Set up collaborative workflow: Mixed optimistic and pessimistic approach using « Git + EMF
Compare »
 Still need read-only elements. Simple with Sirius extension:
 org.eclipse.sirius.ecore.extender.PermissionProvider

HELP
 Provide on topic integrated help for each feature using « Help expression »

16I-BP & Obeo - Arthur Daussy
SPECIFIER PERSPECTIVE

VERY FLEXIBLE
 For quickly designed editor, Sirius wizard does an amazing job but…
 Legacy business rules complexity and ergonomy continuity required us to customize
everything…
 So we did…
 Easily provide custom widget using a well-documented extension point
 org.eclipse.eef.ide.ui.eefLifecycleManagerProvider
 Implements our own wizards for scoping and reference selection
 Implements our own tool for navigation (hyperlink style)
 And many more

ADAPTABLE
 Editing Sirius properties have the same benefits as Editing Sirius representations
 Live reloading of properties/wizards when the VSM is changed
 Perfect for workshop with users
 Changing UI can even be performed during Sprint demo
 Perfect when working in really short sprints with a lot feedback from key users
 Continuity: Easy to update Sirius/Sirius properties even to major version
 Done one or two major Sirius/Sirius property update during the project at no cost

ARCHITECTURE YOUR SOLUTION GLOBALLY THEN FOCUS ON DETAIL
 Create custom generic service for each identified feature:
 One service for navigation
 aql:self.navigate() => Display the result in our custom « model explorer view »
 One service for validation
 aql:self.validate() => Run default EMF Validation framework
 One service for reference selection/scope
 aql:self.getCandidatesTree(‘referenceName’) => Displays candidates using a Tree
 aql:self.getCandidatesList(‘referenceName’) => Display candidates using a List
 One service for label
 Aql:self.getFeatureLabel(‘featureName’) => Return the label to use for this reference
 Aql:self.getObjectLabel () => Return the label of the object
 One service for modification
 aql:self.put(‘featureName’, value)
 …

TEST EVERYTHING
 Use java service => Easy to test
 To speed up your test writing look at BOEM
 Test services call
 Creation of a custom tool to test service call in the VSM
 Ex: aql:self.getFeatureLabel(‘featureName’)
 We know what self is so we can check if featureName is a valid feature
(Based on some work done on UML Designer)
 Test coverage
 Currently more than 7000 tests for the VSM and services

BENEFITS: TESTABLE
Testabable

VSM ARCHITECTURE
 Big and unstable language=> Need a tool to initiate and update the VSM
 Simple it is just an EMF Model
 First part : Definition
 Generate a group of each Eclass and an widget for each feature using our custom services
 Second part : Implementation
 Generate a page and a group of each non-abstract Eclass
 For all features (even inherited) create a widget that extends the widget from the definition part

VSM ARCHITECTURE
 Customization for leaf elements in the « implementation » part
 Hide, Conditional display, Conditional style
 Customization for all elements are done in the « definition part »
 Benefits
 Order: Each feature is classified by its owning EClass
 Use efficiently inheritance mechanisms
 Drawbacks
 Big VSM ( but in our use case Sirius scaled very well)

EXPERIMENTED DRAWBACKS
 VSM does not use ids…
 Make it really hard to work in parallel (with Git + EMF Compare)
 Adding dynamically widgets is quite difficult at the moment
 https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=506988
 Could not find some precious API in the VSM when creating custom tools
 getContextType when writing non-regression tests

CONCLUSION
 Sirius properties
 are very, very flexible
 scale at will
 Can be used even without Sirius (see EEF project)
 Implementation of the modeler and properties took less than 10% of the time.
Most effort was spent on:
 Handling legacy
 Implementing a proper collaborative tooling

FEEL FREE TO ASK ME ANY QUESTION
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

[SiriusCon 2018] Extensive Use of Custom Properties Views in a Banking DSL Workbench

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to [SiriusCon 2018] Extensive Use of Custom Properties Views in a Banking DSL Workbench (20)

More from Obeo (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

[SiriusCon 2018] Extensive Use of Custom Properties Views in a Banking DSL Workbench