[news.eclipse.modeling.mdt.uml2.ocl] OCL Debugging ?

[Andreas Maier <maiera@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Christian,
thanks for the answers. I meant "debugging" at the level of evaluating 
the expressions. In the mean time I got used to validate smaller 
portions of a complex OCL statement if it does not work immediately.

Contributing a debugger: I'm afraid that would be far more than I can 
do, both time-wise and also programming-wise. But I'd be definitely 
interested to test it out if someone wants to engage in that endeavor :-)

Another area that I think could benefit is the area of writing test 
cases against OCL statements. I tend to have only a small number of test 
models which I modify to only once or so cause my (profile based) OCL 
statements to fire, and once that is validated, I leave the models in a 
state where the OCL statements do not fire, because otherwise there are 
too many problem messages around. That approach obviously does not allow 
for regression testing.

Also, in case someone feels inclined to start an "OCL documentation 
project", I'd be willing to spend time and contribute.

Andy

Christian W. Damus wrote:
> Hi, Andy,
>
> That depends on what you mean by debugging.  :-)
>
> If the error messages provided by the parser aren't sufficiently clear to
> indicate what the cause of a parsing problem is, then please raise bugs.
>
> If you have complex OCL expressions that parse but compute the wrong
> results, and you need to find out why, then I'm afraid that there isn't any
> debug support at the OCL level of abstraction.  You will have to debug the
> Java code evaluating your expression (the evaluation visitor) to see:
>
>   - what the AST looks like; this often can indicate what the problem is
>     by seeing how the results of sub-expressions are incorporated into
>     the larger expressions
>
>   - what values are actually computed for each sub-expression
>
> One tip that may help is to visualize your OCL expression in the tree-based
> editor.  Generate an OCL editor from the OCL.ecore model, save your parsed
> OCLExpression in an XMI document, then load it up in the editor.  You can
> then browse the AST to see exactly what the parser thinks your expression
> meant.
>
> An OCL debug UI would, of course, be very cool.  Would you be interested in
> contributing one?
>
> HTH,
>
> Christian
>
>
> Andreas Maier wrote:
>
> > Is there some way to debug OCL ?
> >
> > Andy