Using topes to validate and reformat data in end-user programming tools

Scaffidi, Christopher; Cypher, Allen; Elbaum, Sebastian; Koesnandar, Andhy; Lin, James; Myers, Brad A.; Shaw, Mary

doi:10.1145/1370847.1370850

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Topes [27] is a data model that helps end users validate and manipulate data in spreadsheets. A similar strategy could be used to identify mismatches in data formats.…”

Section: Related Work On Debugging For End Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Debugging support for end user mashup programming

Kuttal

Sarma

Rothermel

2013

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Programming for the web can be an intimidating task, particularly for non-professional ("end-user") programmers. Mashup programming environments attempt to remedy this by providing support for such programming. It is well known, however, that mashup programmers create applications that contain bugs. Furthermore, mashup programmers learn from examples and reuse other mashups, which causes bugs to propagate to other mashups. In this paper we classify the bugs that occur in a large corpus of Yahoo! Pipes mashups. We describe support we have implemented in the Yahoo! Pipes environment to provide automatic error detection techniques that help mashup programmers localize and correct these bugs. We present the results of a think-aloud study comparing the experiences of end-user mashup programmers using and not using our support. Our results show that our debugging enhancements do help these programmers localize and correct bugs more effectively and efficiently.

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“…Topes [27] is a data model that helps end users validate and manipulate data in spreadsheets. A similar strategy could be used to identify mismatches in data formats.…”

Section: Related Work On Debugging For End Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• Mismatch:Format bugs can be detected by using regular expressions or Topes [27]; however, our implementation does not yet support this functionality.…”

Section: An Approach For Detecting Yahoo! Pipes Bugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Debugging support for end user mashup programming

Kuttal

Sarma

Rothermel

2013

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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“…Toped has been integrated with several end-user development tools, including Visual Studio.NET [18], the Robofox web macro tool [6], and Microsoft Excel [18]. Formats can be reused without modification in each of these programming platforms.…”

Section: Validating Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous work described how to algorithmically infer formats from examples [17], how to use Toped formats to validate data in web macro editors and other programming platforms [6] [18], and how to formally model collections of formats [16]. While this work briefly mentions Toped, it does not describe Toped's internal details, nor does it evaluate Toped's expressiveness and usability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast, Accurate Creation of Data Validation Formats by End-User Developers

Scaffidi

Myers

Shaw

2009

End-User Development

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Abstract. Inputs to web forms often contain typos or other errors. However, existing web form design tools require end-user developers to write regular expressions ("regexps") or even scripts to validate inputs, which is slow and errorprone because of the poor match between common data types and the regexp notation. We present a new technique enabling end-user developers to describe data as a series of constrained parts, and we have incorporated our technique into a prototype tool. Using this tool, end-user developers can create validation code more quickly and accurately than with existing techniques, finding 90% of invalid inputs in a lab study. This study and our evaluation of the technique's generality have motivated several tool improvements, which we have implemented and now evaluate using the Cognitive Dimensions framework.

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“…(i) Only a single TSL can be associated with a type, and only when it is declared, so alternate syntactic choices (which are common [17]), or syntax for a type that is not under a programmer's control, cannot be defined. (ii) Syntax cannot be associated with types that are not identified nominally (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Composable and hygienic typed syntax macros

Omar

Wang

Aldrich

2015

Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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Syntax extension mechanisms are powerful, but reasoning about syntax extensions can be difficult. Recent work on type-specific languages (TSLs) addressed reasoning about composition, hygiene and typing for extensions introducing new literal forms. We supplement TSLs with typed syntax macros (TSMs), which, unlike TSLs, are explicitly invoked to give meaning to delimited segments of arbitrary syntax. To maintain a typing discipline, we describe two flavors of term-level TSMs: synthetic TSMs specify the type of term that they generate, while analytic TSMs can generate terms of arbitrary type, but can only be used in positions where the type is otherwise known. At the level of types, we describe a third flavor of TSM that generates a type of a specified kind along with its TSL and show interesting use cases where the two mechanisms operate in concert.

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Using topes to validate and reformat data in end-user programming tools

Cited by 8 publications

References 18 publications

Debugging support for end user mashup programming

Debugging support for end user mashup programming

Fast, Accurate Creation of Data Validation Formats by End-User Developers

Composable and hygienic typed syntax macros

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