Constraint diagrams: visualizing invariants in object-oriented models
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications
The Metamodelling Language Calculus: Foundation Semantics for UML
FASE '01 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering
Validating UML models and OCL constraints
UML'00 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on The unified modeling language: advancing the standard
Core meta-modelling semantics of UML: the pUML approach
UML'99 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on The unified modeling language: beyond the standard
Mixing visual and textual constraint languages
UML'99 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on The unified modeling language: beyond the standard
Corresponding Regions in Euler Diagrams
DIAGRAMS '02 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Diagrammatic Representation and Inference
Joint structural and temporal property specification using timed story scenario diagrams
FASE'07 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Fundamental approaches to software engineering
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OCL's contribution to the definition of constraint languages is twofold: the identification of core concepts for a constraint language suitable for object-oriented modeling; a developer-friendly notation for that language, as an alternative to traditional mathematical syntax. Whilst the former is an important contribution the latter is more questionable. Not only is notation often a matter of taste, but it would also be desirable to freely mix notations, allowing the most appropriate notation to be chosen for the task at hand or for notations to be seamlessly interchanged. A further problem when writing constraints is scalability: the number and complexity of constraints can be overwhelming for a model of a real-sized system, and current techniques for organizing the constraint space of a model are limited. The contribution of this paper is to provide a notation, constraint trees, which can be used both for mixing different notations and for organizing the constraint space of a model. Constraint trees achieve this by revealing aspects of the underlying abstract syntax structure of a constraint. The paper demonstrates the utility of the notation using an example from the telecomms networks domain, and shows how constraint trees can be used to write a constraint involving a mix of textual OCL notation, constraint diagrams, object diagrams and rich pictures. This also demonstrates the organizational role of constraint trees. An outline meta-model definition of constraint trees is provided and issues surrounding their tooling is discussed.