Previous Next Title Page Index Contents

1 Method engineering tools

The specifications of methods in MetaEdit+ are managed with the MetaEdit+ Method Workbench. Method Workbench includes a set of tools for creating and modifying method specifications. These method development tools are:
Property Tool to create property types, like strings or text fields, used by other method components.
Object Tool for specifying object types like Process, State, or Class that are basic components of methods.
Relationship Tool for specifying the connecting components that lie between object types. Examples of these relationship types are Flow in Data Flow Diagrams, or Message Connection in Object Diagrams.
Role Tool for specifying the components that connect relationship types and object types.
Graph Tool for managing specifications of whole techniques (e.g. Class Diagram, Data Flow Diagram). Techniques are composed here of Object, Relationship and Role types defined with other tools, and rules defined here on how these can be connected.

Object, Relationship and Role Tools are all very similar, and Graph Tool just adds some extra graph functions. Common features of these tools are discussed in the section on Object Tool.

The following ancillary tools change the way models made with a method can be represented to users, i.e. their symbols, property dialogs and code or report generation.
Symbol Editor to specify and edit the graphical representation of elements in a graph.
Dialog Editor to edit the layout of the dialogs used for editing the properties of design elements.
Report Browser to specify consistency checks, documentation and code generation for a technique. This tool is described in the MetaEdit+ User’s guide (Section 4.1).

In addition to these development tools, there are tools for managing methods and their components.
Metamodel Browser to browse specifications of techniques by the project they are defined in, showing the types they contain and relations between them.
Type Manager to export method specifications to other MetaEdit+ repositories, and to remove unwanted method specifications.
Info Tool to show information about a given type: which other types it uses, and which types use it.

All of these three sets of tools are also present in the standard version of MetaEdit+. There, however, the first set of tools only allows viewing existing methods, not modification or creation; the other tools may be used freely.

Previous Next Title Page Index Contents