Aconite: Towards Generating Sirius-Based Graphical Editors from Annotated Metamodels

Abstract

Sirius is a powerful framework for implementing graphical editors for modelling languages. Sirius can help manage model complexity by presenting the same model through multiple notations ("viewpoints" in Sirius), dedicated to different audiences and/or tasks. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of having to manually define the mapping between each viewpoint and the metamodel. This paper explores a textual notation to efficiently annotate a metamodel with such a mapping, and transform the metamodel into one or more Sirius viewpoint descriptors, with the aim to reduce the manual work required to produce and maintain Sirius-based graphical notations. We present Aconite, an open-source tool which implements this approach, and demonstrate it through the re-implementation of a common Sirius example notation, and a simplified version of a BPMN editor. Aconite includes mechanisms for automated generation of navigation expressions in common scenarios, and for inheritance of graphical styles to reduce repetition.