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Usage of the manual

Although MetaEdit+ Method Workbench is easy to use, the large number of features may appear overwhelming to new users. This section provides some guidance on how to go about learning MetaEdit+ Method Workbench, and how best to use this manual.

Guidance for learning

To become familiar with MetaEdit+ Method Workbench, you must first be familiar with the other features of MetaEdit+. Below is a suggested way to get started:
1)Read the MetaEdit+ User’s Guide Introduction (Chapter 1) to get an overview of the environment.
2)Walk through the MetaEdit+ User’s Guide tutorial (Chapter 6). You do not need to complete each step in detail, but it is good to have an idea of the basic functionality of the tools where your metamodels will be used.
3)Read the MetaEdit+ User’s Guide Chapter 5, metamodel and graph structures to get an understanding about the Object Repository of MetaEdit+. This chapter describes how design information is structured and how you can link and reuse information you have already stored in the MetaEdit+ repository. You will use the concepts described here as you modify and create methods and their components with MetaEdit+ Method Workbench. A thorough understanding of these concepts will help you take full advantage of the power of the MetaEdit+ customisation features.
4)Walk through the Method Workbench tutorial (Chapter 2 in this manual). Especially for new users, the tutorial is the most efficient way to get to grips with MetaEdit+ Method Workbench. It introduces the user to method customisation, and familiarises him with the Method Workbench tools. This part of the manual is best read while sitting at your computer so that you can experiment with the features of Method Workbench as they are described in the text.
5)Read the tools chapter (Chapter 1 here), once you have completed the tutorial and gained some experience with MetaEdit+. The chapter contains in-depth information about each of the method development tools that you used in the tutorial.
6)Use the menu reference (Chapter 3 here). The menu reference chapter forms a quick source of information about MetaEdit+ functionality, thus serving both experienced users and novices.

MetaEdit+ is a dynamic product under continual improvement, and there may occasionally be some differences between what is described in the printed manual and what is found in the current version. The HTML-based manual, however, is updated for any new changes or improvements as it comes together with the software installation package and patch files. Therefore, you are strongly advised to use the HTML-based version of the manual.

Conventions

Throughout the manual, you will find special notes and comments which point out important features and characteristics of the MetaEdit+ environment. These notes are printed in italics and are marked by an arrow () in the left margin. The steps required for performing MetaEdit+’s various functions are indented and numbered: 1), 2), 3) etc.

Menus, mouse buttons and dialogs

Throughout this manual we assume a right-handed mouse, i.e. one where the left mouse button is used for most operations. Further, we assume it has two buttons, referred to as left and right. If your mouse has three buttons, the middle button normally initially works as a ‘right’ button. In this case, you can swap the middle and right buttons’ menus by pressing the right button and choosing ‘swap mouse buttons’.

Tools in MetaEdit+ have two kinds of menus: pull-down and pop-up. Pull-down menus are found in the menu bar under the window title bar, and pop-up menus are related to elements of the models. To use a pull down menu, select its label from the menu bar with the left mouse button and choose the desired function from the menu that appears. You may also access pull-down menus with their accessor keys, underlined in the menu. An individual menu item may also have its own shortcut keys, shown on the right of the menu item.

To use pop-up menus, first select the element to be operated on (e.g. with the left mouse button), and then use the right-mouse button to open the pop-up menu for further action. In all tools of MetaEdit+ the pop-up menu contains the specific functionality appropriate to the selected element.

List dialogs

MetaEdit+ makes extensive use of list dialogs for selecting among elements. To quickly select a known element in the list, simply type the first few letters of that element’s name when the dialog opens. This moves the cursor to the first element whose name begins with those letters. Pressing enter will choose the framed element, closing the dialog. Pressing space selects the framed element, and resets the typed buffer, so you can start typing a different name. You can also double click an element to choose it and close the dialog.

Some dialogs allow multiple selections: use shift-click or shift-space to select a contiguous section of the list, and control-click or control-space to select individual elements. Again, a double click first performs the selection operation (modified by shift or control keys), and then closes the dialog.

The Windows user interface standard prevents resizing of modal dialogs, which can make life difficult if not everything is visible in the default size. To help in such situations, MetaEdit+ includes a triangular resize corner at the bottom right of most dialogs. By clicking and dragging the resize corner, you can resize the dialog window to be larger.

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