MDRAnt "How To"

Author:

Petr Hrebejk, NetBeans / Sun Microsystems

History:

Available in the CVS

How to build

Building should be easy. Just run ant in %nbroot%/extras/mdrant directory.
Notice that you have to checkout the mdr module from CVS and build it first. And you also have to checkout the openide module. (The build script needs it for building the openide-lookup.jar, which contains the Lookup library and the ErrorManager).

How to use

For example of usage. Please see the sample.xml file. This file contains a demo script which:

• Instantiates the MOF package
• Loads UML 1.4 metamodel into this package
• Just for fun it generates the XMI file from the same package and it also generates the DTD for this file. (This step is useless of course and is included only to demonstrate how to export XMI files and how to produce DTD's.
• Creates sources of the JMI interfaces for the UML metamodel
• Crates class files for the JMI interafaces
• Compiles the JMI interfaces. (Again doing both creating the class files and compiling the interfaces is redundant)

Notice that you will need to customize various paths to files in the build script and that the UML 1.4 XMI file is downloadable from the Metamodel catalog. It should be easy for everyone who is familiar with ant to guess how the MDR ANT task works. However here is a simple documentation.

mdr is the main mdr task. It serves as a wrapper for mdr subtasks. You need to specify the storage file of the repository using the storageFile attribute.
This task can contain various subtasks. List of subtasks follows. The names of subtasks should be selfexplanatory for attributes of the tasks plase consult the sample.xml file.
Each subtask runs in it's own transaction which is rolled back when exception is thrown from the subtask execution.

• instantiate Instantiates either the default MOF package. Or given MOF package in given extent when extent and package attributes are used.
• readXMI Imports given XMI file into given extent.
• writeXMI Exports whole content of an extent into given XMI file
• writeDTD Creates DTD for XMI for given extent
• mapJava Maps given extent into java interfaces according to the JMI standard
• mapClass Same as mapJava but produces already compiled classes instead of source.
• printExtentNames Simpli print's out names of extents in the repository.

ToDo list

1. Add verbosity attribute into MdrTask to control the number of messages printed into console when the task is running.
2. Add header (optionaly) headerFile attribute into MapJava task.
3. Create task and build script for Martin Matula's UML2MOF convertor
4. Write a generic subtask which will allow users to run their own programs on the repository.
5. Wite more detailed documentation