Ecore, genmodel and OCL

Question

I am defining the meta model of a domain specific modeling language by means of Ecore in EMF. I therefore generate an editor from the related genmodel I can use to create models conform to the meta-model. I would like to specify some OCL constraint on the values that some elements of the meta-model can assume. It would be very nice if I could specify these constraint in the Ecore model and have the related checks automatically generated editor Java code.

Is there a standard way to do that?

Answer 1

You should have a look at the recent work of the OCL project in Eclipse with "OCL in Ecore" or you could try one of the other way to integrate OCL with Ecore specified in the OCL Juno documentation.

Answer 2

First step is to decide how you want to add constraints to your ecore (meta-)model. There is two ways I am aware at the moment, you can do this:

1- having ocl expressions embedded in annotation elements of the ecore model.

2- having OCL expressions in the separate file beside ecore.

For getting more information on the first approach look at OCLInEcore , and for the second one look at OCLComplete . It seems that they are providing some API for checking OCL constraint for the given models (conformance check).

For your purpose, it seems that OCLInEcore is suitable. You can have your ocl embedded in ecore, and you can use the API provided by OCLInEcore to check if the given model satisfy ocl constraints.

Hope this helps.