Writing bidirectional model transformations as intentional updates

Abstract

Model synchronization plays an important role in modeldriven software development. Bidirectional model transformation approaches provide techniques for developers to specify the bidirectional relationship between source and target models, while keeping related models synchronized for free. Since models of interest are usually not in a one-to-one correspondence, this synchronization process is inherently ambiguous. Nevertheless, existing bidirectional model transformation tools focus mainly on enforcing consistency and provide developers only limited control over how models are synchronized, solving the latent ambiguity via default strategies whose behavior is unclear to developers. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which developers write update programs that succinctly describe how a target model can be used to update a source model, such that the bidirectional behavior is fully determined. The new approach mitigates the unpredictability of existing solutions, by enabling a finer and more transparent control of what a bidirectional transformation does, and suggests a research direction for building more robust bidirectional model transformation tools.

Towards Attribute-Based Authorisation for Bidirectional Programming

“…More recently, put-based languages (sometimes also called putback languages) have been proposed, such as BiFluX [27,36]. Put-based languages ask the developer to provide a put function, and derive the get function automatically.…”

“…Put-based languages ask the developer to provide a put function, and derive the get function automatically. Since it can be shown that, for a given put function, there is only one get function that produces a well-behaved bidirectional transformation [27,36], developers have better control over the behaviour of their transformations.…”

“…Bidirectional transformations have recently received a lot of attention, both from the programming languages community [2,4,11,17,20,36,27] and from the software engineering community, where they have been used in contexts as varied as model-driven engineering [19,35], consistent website updating [25], parallel programming [24], and many others [6]. Since 2012, a workshop dedicated to bidirectional transformations is organised every year [16].…”

Enhancing the JTL tool for bidirectional transformations

“…Consequently, since current languages are able to generate only one model, nondeterministic transformations involved in round-tripping can give rise to results, which are somewhat unpredictable. In these cases, the solution is normally identified according to heuristics or to the order the rules are written [16,17]. A typical example is the Collapse/Expand State Diagrams benchmark defined in [3]: starting from a hierarchical state diagram (involving some one-level nesting), a flat view has to be provided.…”

A simulation-driven model-based approach for designing software-intensive systems-of-systems architectures

“…A transformation from a source model to a target model is termed as forward transformation, whilst a transformation from a given target model back to a source model is known as backward transformation. Bidirectional transformations can be executed in both directions, which is useful in the context of synchronization between models and code HELSEN, 2003;STEVENS, 2008;CZARNECKI et al, 2009;STEVENS, 2010;PACHECO;. Bidirectional transformations can be achieved using bidirectional rules or by defining two separate complementary unidirectional rules, one for each direction.…”