Object Constraint Language (OCL): A Definitive Guide

Abstract

Abstract. The Object Constraint Language (OCL) started as a complement of the UML notation with the goal to overcome the limitations of UML (and in general, any graphical notation) in terms of precisely specifying detailed aspects of a system design. Since then, OCL has become a key component of any model-driven engineering (MDE) technique as the default language for expressing all kinds of (meta)model query, manipulation and specification requirements. Among many other applications, OCL is frequently used to express model transformations (as part of the source and target patterns of transformation rules), well-formedness rules (as part of the definition of new domain-specific languages), or code-generation templates (as a way to express the generation patterns and rules).This chapter pretends to provide a comprehensive view of this language, its many applications and available tool support as well as the latest research developments and open challenges around it.

Metamodel and Constraints Co-evolution: A Semi Automatic Maintenance of OCL Constraints

“…They dene the structural aspects of a business domain, i.e. the main concepts, their properties, and the relationships between them [4]. However, a metamodel alone is insucient to capture all the relevant aspects and information of a domain specication [18].…”

Partial loading of XMI models

“…To enable interoperability of models, EMF supports serialising models in the XMI format. Based on EMF, a large number of different MDE tools have been developed for different model management operations, such as OCL for model validation [14,15], XText and MoDisco for text-to-model transformation [16,17], ATL and ETL for model-to-model transformation [18,19], EGL and Acceleo for model-to-text transformation [7,20], model merging [21], etc. EMF has become a de facto standard for building MDE tools [22] provided that the majority of model management tools in MDE are implemented atop EMF.…”

“…• Each of the last three lines (13)(14)(15) cause the parser to pop the top element of its stack -thus ending up with an empty stack.…”

A collaborative testbed web tool for learning model transformation in software engineering education

“…The validation services are also called through JSP requests and their function is to check that Object Constraint Language (OCL) (Cabot, 2012) constraints and other structural definitions specified in the metamodels are fulfilled.…”