XText using type information from an external EMF Model

Question

I'm looking into using XText to make an extenstion DSL to a language that I use daily and has some obvious shortcomings (AS3, through FlashBuilder).

I have a grammar and code generation system working, where the below declaration generates a value class, with constructor, class level vars and getters etc.

class Person (name: String, age: int)

This is fine, but I would like the have the types defined in the flash player library and also the types that I define in users projects available in my extension DSL. In the code above both String and int come from the native flash library.

I presume that Flash Builder uses the EMF core internally to represent both any included libs (swcs) and any types I define in my projects. If this is the case, my question is:

How can I access the EMF model of FLash Builder?

If there is no EMF model then I presume I would have to parse the library.swc myself and the source code of my projects.

Is the Xtend language intended to preform these sort of native filesystem tasks?

Thanks

Answer 1

Let us asume the Flash Builder comes with an EMF based metamodel. then the "thing" you have to do is to implement a IResourceServiceProvider. I have blogged on doing the very same stuff for uml models: http://christiandietrich.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/xtext-2-0-and-uml/

and no: xtend is a modern style programming language that compiles to Java and has nice Templating support.