Operationalizing the integration of user interaction specifications in the synthesis of modeling editors

Abstract

A long shortcoming in the automatic generation of domain-specific modeling (DSM) editors has been the lack of user experience, in particular, user interaction adapted to its user. The current practice relies solely on the abstract and concrete syntax of the language, restricting the user interaction with the editor to a set of generic interactions built-in the tool. To increase the user experience with DSM editors, we propose to specify the different viewpoints of interactions (e.g., I/O devices, component of the interface, behavior of the editor) each modeled at the right level of abstraction for its user expert. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, by anchoring the operational semantics of all these viewpoints in a Statecharts model that controls the DSM editor. We report on the complex transformation that takes as input different viewpoints are expressed in at distinct levels of abstraction, to produce a custom interaction with the DSM editor based on a RETE algorithm. Our implementation shows that we can produce correct and responsive results by emulating existing DSM editors.