[rmf-dev] IDs for non-ReqIF elements

[Michael Jastram <michael@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

Hussein and I had a technical discussion regarding the management of IDs.  As you probably know, he contributed some code in that area that ensures that we don't have duplicate IDs in our models.  We had that problem in the past, especially when users extended the model via copy & paste (Thanks!).

Turns out that the current implementation does too much: For instance, it also assigend IDs to xhtml:p elements.  While this is not wrong, it can still create problems.  For instance, it may create false positives when looking for changes.

The key logic lives in org.eclipse.rmf.reqif10.serialization.ReqIF10ResourceImpl.  For now, I changed the logic to only consider elements from the ReqIF10Package:

    public void setID(final EObject eObject, final String id) {
        final EAttribute idAttribute = eObject.eClass().getEIDAttribute();
        if ((idAttribute != null) && (id != null)) {
           
            // Only to this for ReqIF IDs (and not for XHTML, etc.)           
            if (idAttribute.getEType().eContainer() instanceof ReqIF10Package) {
                eObject.eSet(idAttribute, id);
            }
        }
        super.setID(eObject, id);
    }

The question to the dev group is: Is this a good solution?  In particular, Hussein suggests to turn the logic around: explicitly exclude XHTML and continue ID management for everything else.

Any thoughts?

Thanks & best wishes,

- Michael   

--

Dr. Michael Jastram	+49 (162) 274 83 94	http://jastram.de
Geschäftsführer	Formal Mind GmbH	http://formalmind.com
Gründer	rheinjug e.V.	http://rheinjug.de
Project Lead	Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework	http://eclipse.org/rmf