Comments on: Customize your GMF editor by customizing templates

By: Romain Bioteau

Romain Bioteau — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:09:47 +0000

Hi Mostafa,
The way to do this is to use a Custom Figure in the GMFGraph.

By: Mostafa ElShafei

Mostafa ElShafei — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:39:57 +0000

Hello

I want to change the EditPart inner class where I find the EditPart Figure. I know that the generated code is in
the gmfgen file. However, I need to add to the Inner class constructor.

Is there any way to do this on the templates level??

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Mostafa ElShafei

By: Moving a RCP application from Galileo to Helios: feedback and tips « Bonita open source BPM community blog

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:13:55 +0000

[...] providers and Aspect templates limits the amount of customized code to check. In fact most of the modifications were done to [...]

By: Is Eclipse GMF a Suitable Platform for Model Driven Applications? « Active Knowledge Modeling

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:36:36 +0000

[...] requires quite a lot of unnecessary manual labor. Though GMF lets you provide your own templates for code generation, we haven’t found a way to customize the generation of intermediary graphical, tools, and mapping [...]

By: Aurelien Pupier

Aurelien Pupier — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:35:11 +0000

Xpand (and qvto) template is not the only lever that GMF provides. (thinking about gmf providers or using aspects on the generated code )

And after all, as all the generated code is generated based on these templates, you can modify all this code based on them.
I’m agree that it can be sometimes really tricky. To modify directly the generated code can be far easier. But I really think that it implies at long term the code to become unmanageable.

I don’t see cases which requires to modify directly the generated code but perhaps it will come.If you have some samples, I will be curious to see them

Regards,
Aurelien

By: Stephan Herrmann

Stephan Herrmann — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:28:36 +0000

Lucky you, if you’re able to do everything at the template level

I’m not a GMF expert, but what I understand from others is,
that a lot of the fine-tuning is extremely difficult to achieve without going to
the source code level. I mean, the UML2 editor was intended as a show case
for GMF and they already used custom templates and still they had to do
lots and lots of customizations in the generated Java sources.

But sure, if you don’t need that things are a lot easier for you.

cheers
Stephan

By: Aurelien Pupier

Aurelien Pupier — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:03:19 +0000

Glad that you like.

No, we never have to modify the generated source code.

We really think that modify the templates used for generation is better. Like that we can modify the behavior of the generated code as we want.

Of what I understood of your case study, you are using aspect-oriented technologies on the generated code in order to modify the behavior of generated code.
In our case, we customize templates in order to have directly the generated code having the behavior that we want. The aspects are only used on the template in order to have an “elegant way” to modify these templates.

Regards and thanks for your feedback

By: Stephan Herrmann

Stephan Herrmann — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:18:17 +0000

Sounds cool!
We have a case study where we did s.t. similar not to the templates but at source code level:
we pulled out all custom code from the class diagram editor of the UML2Tools project.
I was planing to present this at EclipseCon:
https://www.eclipsecon.org/submissions/2010/view_talk.php?id=1170
but I had no luck with the talk selection this year.

Maybe we should join forces and demonstrate elegant top-to-bottom customization?
Do you ever customize generated source code?