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MODELS 2020
Fri 16 - Fri 23 October 2020
Fri 23 Oct 2020 13:15 - 13:35 at Room A - A6-Modeling Environments and Model Search Chair(s): Antonio Cicchetti

Producing graphical views from software and system models is often desirable for communication and comprehension purposes, even when graphical model editing capabilities are not required - because the preferred editable concrete syntax of the models is text-based, or for models extracted via reverse engineering. To support such scenarios, we present a novel approach for efficient rule-based generation of transient graphical views from models using lazy model-to-text transformation, and an implementation of the proposed approach in the form of an open-source Eclipse plugin named Picto. Picto builds on top of mature visualisation software such as Graphviz and PlantUML and supports, among others, composite views, layers, and multi-model visualisation. We illustrate how Picto can be used to produce various forms of graphical views such as node-edge diagrams, tables and sequence-like diagrams, and we demonstrate the efficiency benefits of lazy view generation approach against batch model-to-text transformation for generating views from large models.

Picto is part of the Epsilon platform: https://www.eclipse.org/epsilon/doc/picto/