Abstract
Xtext is a widely accepted framework to develop domain-specific languages (DSLs). However, these DSLs are bound to be purely textual, what is appropriate in many but not all cases. Sometimes, one wishes to have another concrete syntax for a DSL. For example, a model should be represented only by graphical elements (i.e., a purely graphical syntax) or by a mixture of graphical elements and textual annotations (i.e., a hybrid syntax).
In this paper, we describe an approach for developing a graphical editor for a hybrid concrete syntax of a given DSL. The starting point is an Xtext grammar of a DSL, together with all the usual accompanying features such as validators and code generators. We describe the necessary steps to enrich the existing toolset with a graphical editor based on the GEF framework.
Our approach is highly flexible since large parts of the editor can be implemented and tailored manually to accommodate the underlying DSL. Nevertheless, the effort to create such an editor is manageable, since the GEF framework offers most of the necessary features for graphical editing. We describe what conditions must be met with regards to the underlying language designed with Xtext and how a corresponding graphical GEF-based editor for a hybrid syntax can be implemented.
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Notes
- 1.
The described editor together with its source code is freely available from https://github.com/m-toussaint/SME.
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Toussaint, M., Baar, T. (2018). Enriching Textual Xtext-DSLs with a Graphical GEF-Based Editor. In: Petrenko, A., Voronkov, A. (eds) Perspectives of System Informatics. PSI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10742. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74313-4_29
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74313-4_29
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