Projecting an instance from a A4Solution

Question

I'm trying to make a new UI to visualize my Alloy instances. I've got an A4Solution and have been successful in extracting atoms, relations, checking atom signatures BUT I can't seem to understand how to project the instance on some sig.

I've noticed that I can try to use the edu.mit.csail.sdg.alloy4viz.AlloyInstance, I've got options to project there, but that'd imply in starting over, from a different angle.

Would that be the way to go? I'd prefer to extract that from the A4Solution object.

Thanks

Answer 1

You might want to look at the edu.mit.csail.sdg.alloy4viz.StaticProjector class and its project methods---that's how the Alloy Visualizer implements projections. If your visualization uses the edu.mit.csail.sdg.alloy4viz.AlloyModel class, you should be able to reuse the existing code in StaticProjector; from your post it seems, however, that you'd prefer not use any of the alloy4viz classes, in which case it should not be too difficult to understand how StaticProjector works and reapply the same ideas to your project. Or you could convert an A4Solution object to an AlloyInstance[1] and build your visualizer around the alloy4viz classes, which, in my opinion, would be a good way to go about your project.

[1] something like:

a4sol.writeXML("instance.xml")
AlloyInstance inst = StaticInstanceReader.parseInstance(new File("instance.xml"));