Papyrus/Mars Work Description/Improvments/Stereotype support

Enhancement of the support for the stereotypes in Papyrus

This page presents the improvments that will be pushed in the Mars version of Papyrus regarding the stereotypes support in the tool.

Introduction

The starting point of this study is due to concomitant issues around the stereotype display:

• The first whished improvement is to display the stereotypes when dragged and dropped from the model explorer.
• The second whish would be to use the Named Styles instead of EAnnotation in order to be aligned with the Papyrus point of view and be based on GMF layer.
• The third point is the user interface to display the Stereotype that doesn’t fulfil the user expectation in terms of intuitiveness.

State of art

Concepts in place

The Stereotype feature contains two types of display, which are more or less independent.

• The stereotype name label
  • Can be displayed or hidden
  • With a short name or a Qualified Name
• The stereotype properties
  • Can be displayed or hidden
  • Can be shown in a compartment, as a comment or in braces

On top of that, there are several actions taking part in the stereotype display:

• When displaying or hiding an item (stereotype Label or property label) from the appearance property view.
• When a new stereotype is applied or unapplied from the profile tab into the property view.

Those different cases should be part of the solution. But as there are quite independent, they can be treated as such.

Conception

In Papyrus, Stereotypes are stored into UML model. But the information related to manner to display stereotypes is stored through the EAnnotation. EAnnotation is an EMF concept that is attached to an object of type EModelElement. The EAnnotation details is a Map of type EMap<String,String>. In the case of “Stereotype”, the EAnnotation name is “Stereotype_Annotation”, the related map contains the following list of properties and values:

KEY (String)	VALUE (String)	Description
Stereotype_Presentation_Kind	TextIconStereotype	The kind of presentation for stereotype
	IconStereotype
	ImageStereotype
	HorizontalStereo
	VerticalStereo
StereotypeList	Block, Allocated	The list of stereotype to display
StereotypeWithQualifiedNameList	SysML::Allocations::Allocated, SysML::Blocks::Block	The list of stereotype to display with Qualified Name
PropStereoDisplay	SysML::Blocks::Block.isEncapsulated	List of properties to display
StereotypePropertyLocation	Compartment	Location of Stereotype Properties
	In Brace
	Comment

Property View

The profile and stereotypes applied are available under the tab “Profile” of the property view of the diagram or of the object. All the information about the display of those stereotypes is available under the “Appearance” tab.

++ Images

1. What information should be displayed (Text, icon, image, text and Icon)
2. How the stereotypes should be aligned (Horizontal or vertical )
3. Location of the stereotype information to be displayed (in a specific compartment, as a comment, or between bracket )
4. The selection tree of the applied stereotypes with their properties
5. Pair of buttons to display either short stereotype name, or the whole qualified name.

Architecture

Here is the general overview of the Stereotypes architecture with EAnnotation. ++ Image

Here is the class diagram of the Stereotype EAnnotation concept: ++ Image

Observations

Several observations can be done from this conception:

1. EAnnotation is difficult to maintain, it is string based only, and a lot of classes, constants and methods are required to put EAnnotation in place.
2. EAnnotation is not well designed for a CSS compatibility. It is then difficult to have a good customization.
3. The user interface into the “Appearance” Tab is not clear. The two buttons to display qualified name and short name are ambiguous.
4. The property view is directly in charge of creating Commands to manage the EAnnotation, instead of separated responsibilities between graphical interface, user actions, and command creations.

For those reasons, the entire Stereotype display mechanism must be improved.

Requirements ( Draft )

Req ID	Category	Description
STO_01	Default display	The stereotypes are display by default (during the creation, when DnD, when applied).
STO_02	New Stereotype	The stereotypes displayed should be automatically updated when applied stereotypes list changes.
STO_03	Qualified Name	Each Stereotype can be either displayed with a short name or with the Qualified Name.
STO_04	Qualified Name	The displayed qualified name depth can be defined for each stereotype.
STO_05	Location	Properties can be either displayed in a compartment, in a comment, or between braces.
STO_06	Location	The user should be able to choose the location of each stereotype's property (In compartment, in braces, as a comment).
STO_07	Hide	Each stereotype and property can be displayed or hidden independantly.
STO_08	CSS	Visibility, qualified name depth and location can be defined by CSS.
STO_09	CSS	A CSS file can be added for each Stereotype to manage its display.

Tasks and bugs

Bugzilla

The bugzilla items tracking progress of this improvments are:

• Bug 457024