Description Stephan Eberle 2012-12-19 08:38:27 EST

The Sphinx editor socket for Graphiti already includes support for dragging and dropping model elements from the Sphinx Model Explorer onto a Graphiti diagram (see org.eclipse.sphinx.graphiti.workspace.ui for details). A corresponding support should be made available for GMF diagrams.

A good part of the stuff that has been made for Graphiti is of generic nature. For example, when some elements are dnd'ed we create the graphical representations of those elements (naturally). In addition, we also traverse all cross references going off the dnd'ed elements. When we find some where the both ends have graphical representations (or are about to have because they are among the elements being dnd'ed) then we create the graphical representations for the cross references too. This yields the very nice and impressive behavior that we do not only get the selected model elements displayed in the diagram but also all the wiring between them.

To avoid redundancy, we should refactor this part it in a way that it can be externalized into the existing Sphinx plug-in '''org.eclipse.sphhinx.emf.ui''' or a new Sphinx plug-in named '''org.eclipse.sphinx.gmp.ui'''. From there, the generic drag & drop functionality can be reused by both Graphiti and GMF. 

We should also evolve the exemplary GMF diagram editor for Hummingbird Instance Models. It has been generated with GMF tooling using default settings. As a consequence it is synchronized, i.e., it always displays all elements that are present in the underlying resource but cannot display only a subset of them. To get rid of these implications, we should stop using GMF tooling and reimplement the diagram editor directly on top of GMF runtime.