Conference article

Implementation of a Graphical Modelica Editor with Preserved Source Code Formatting

Tobias Matsson
Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Sweden

Jon Sten
Department of Computer Science, Lund University, Sweden

Tove Bergdahl
Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden

Jesper Matsson
Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden

Johan Åkesson
Department of Automatic Control, Lund University/Modelon AB, Sweden

Download articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3384/ecp12076375

Published in: Proceedings of the 9th International MODELICA Conference; September 3-5; 2012; Munich; Germany

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 76:39, p. 375-384

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Published: 2012-11-19

ISBN: 978-91-7519-826-2

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

When an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is developed; the support for multiple views of the same document is often essential. An example of this is Modelica models; as it should be possible to view and edit the same model in both its textual and graphical representation.

One implementation of Modelica is the open-source platform JModelica.org. It contains the JModelica.org IDE; that provides a text editor for Modelica code; based on the Eclipse platform.

In this paper; we present an implementation of a graphical editor for the JModelica.org IDE. Several challenges with implementing a graphical editor for Modelica are discussed. Among others; the difficulties in rendering Modelica diagrams and how to interact with existing frameworks in Eclipse are brought up. A method for preserving the formatting of a modified source code file is also presented; which is essential when the model is altered in the graphical editor.

The presented implementation is compared to other open source software (OSS) implementations of Modelica editors.

Keywords

AST; JModelica.org; Eclipse; GEF; Graphical Editing; Icon Rendering; Preserved File Formatting; Pretty Printing

References

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