Domain element visualization extensions (17-Sep-2009)
Discloser is a method to create new visualizer by visually decorating existing domain visualizer. The benefit includes defining new visualizers based on existing visualizer with minimum amount of work
Domain element visualization extensions
Background
Domain element visualization provides a visual representation of a domain element, showing the structure of elements and relationships between elements as well as providing editing capabilities for those elements. There are many domain visualizers e.g. Java, C++, EJB (Enterprise Java Bean), XSD (XML (Extended meta language) Schema Definition), WSDL (Web Service Definition Language), etc.) have been developed on top of a Visualizer Framework. These visualizers have been implemented to render the domain elements in a UML (Unified Modeling Language) representation.
The Visualizer Framework has a service called model mapping service which defines a mapping relation between a domain element and a UML element. The original model mapping service, allows developers to register a visualizer for a specific context, typically registered based on file extension. For example, the Java visualizer is registered for .
java files. The framework allows for
multiple visualizers to register against the same context with a priority rating used to determine which visualizer will handle the domain element. In this way, developers can fully override the behavior of an existing visualizer.
However, some domains are becoming more extensible. The chief example is the Java domain. Java has introduced annotations into its language, allowing developers to define their own annotations to include additional information, which can be used within the Java language or by supporting tools. Some examples of extensions are the JPA (Java Persistence API ( Application Programming Interface ) )and EJB 3.0 extensions which have defined a set of annotations to markup the Java code.
To support these extensible domains, a mechanism needs to be defined to allow visualizer developers to extend the visualization of a domain rather than simply override the visualization of the domain or writing a completely new visualizer. For example, developers should be able to
provide extensions to the Java visualizer to handle JPA and EJB
3.0 visualization, benefiting from all of the basic Java visualization functionality (class, method,
property visualization).
General Description
This disclosed method defines a secondary registration mechanism allowin...
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