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Temporal OCL Plugin for Eclipse

What is the Temporal OCL Plugin?

Temporal OCL is a temporal extension of OCL that enables modelers/developers to specify temporal constraints on object-oriented models. We do so by relying on Dwyers's specification patterns. You can write temporal OCL constraints without any technical knowledge of formalisms commonly used to describe temporal properties such as LTL or CTL logics.

This extension is integrated into the Eclipse/MDT current OCL plug-in, it provides a framework not only to constrain dynamic behavior of object-oriented systems, but other to generate functional tests for objects and verify their properties.

This tool provides 2 features:

  1. The Xtext-based Editor for Temporal OCL;
  2. The Regular Expression Generator from Temporal OCL constraints.

This work is funded by the French ANR TASCCC project (ANR-09-SEGI-014).

This work is also funded by the Motorola Solutions Foundation that are working to address the emerging needs of the public safety community.

Tooling

License

This plugin is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Eclipse Public License.

However, I would like to be kept informed if you make interesting changes to this plugin.

Download & Installation Instructions

Temporal OCL is a plugin for the Eclipse MDT. Before you can install or use Temporal OCL, you must have a compatible version of Eclipse installed on your development computer. Follow next steps:

  1. Download Eclipse Juno (4.2) MDT from here and select the version that is compatible with your operating system
  2. Start Eclipse, then select Help > Install New Software... Click Add, in the top-right corner. In the Add Repository dialog that appears, enter "Temporal OCL" for the Name and the following URL for the Location, then Click OK:
    http://wwwdi.supelec.fr/taha/temporalocl/update/
  3. In the Available Software dialog, select Temporal OCL and click Next. In the next window, you'll see a list of the tools to be downloaded. Click Next. Read and accept the license agreements, then click Finish. When the installation completes, restart Eclipse.

Getting Started & Examples

To get an example of usage of Temporal OCL plugin. Follow next steps:

  1. Download this example here
  2. Go to File -> Import. The following dialog will appear. Select Existing Projects into Workspace. Click the radio button next to Select archive file and click the Browse button on the following dialog.
  3. Find the archive file on your hard disk. Click Open to select it. Click Finish
  4. The project should now appear in your Project Explorer view!

Now, you can use both features:

  • Editing with Temporal OCL Editor
    Note that the last editor you used for a file will be used next time, so you might have to right-click on the file and use Open With instead of Open to select the correct editor: Temporal OCL Editor.
  • Generating equivalent Regular Expression
    Right-click on the ".tocl" file and click the command Temporal OCL to Regular expression under the Translate menu. One ".regex" file will be generated. Refresh "F5" the parent folder to see it.

The Temporal OCL Syntax and Semantics

Download this technical report here (in french), or for more details, download this article here

Download the substitution plugin for GOAL and the patterns/scopes automata here

The Plugin Structure

Under Construction

Contacting the Author

I am Safouan TAHA, an Assistant Professor at Supélec. Check out my professional web page.

Feel free to send me any comments about plugin and this page.

Links

You may find interesting resources about Temporal OCL at the following locations: