Hosted Continuous Integration

Chris blogged about Travis CI a while ago, a site which provides free CI for github projects. Unfortunately, Travis is for github projects only. So, I was wondering if there are other hosted CI solutions available. Here are the results a short google session, some tools are also suggested at stackoverflow:

Site	CI system	Build system	VCS	Trigger	Notification	Pricing	Deployment	Comment
Travis CI	Travis	Maven, Ant, and others	git (github only)	github: Travis hook	email	free for OS	no	still alpha
CloudBees, FOSS free	Jenkins	Maven	git, SVN, and others	github: Jenkins hook	?	free for OS	?
FaZend	Hudson	Maven, Ant, and others	SVN	?	email	free	?	still beta
CodeBetter	TeamCity	Maven	git, SVN, and others	github: TeamCity hook	email, Jabber, and others	free for OS	?
Shining Panda	Jenkins	Maven	git, SVN, and others	github: Jenkins hook	email	€0.36 / hour	?	Focused on Python
Jenkins Hosting (Bubbleware Technology)	Jenkins	?	git, SVN	?	?	free for OS (+ Amazon EC2 fees)	?
continuous.io/	?	?	?	?	?	free for OS (+ Amazon EC2 fees)	?

I focused on support for Java projects and Maven/Ant support. Some remarks:

• Trigger: This means how the build is triggered. This is of course not a feature of the CI system itself, but of the source code repository. Github or Bitbucket provide some hooks, unfortunately, EclipseLabs (GoogleCode) doesn't, or does it?
• Notification: This means how the system does notify the user of the build result. After a successful build, one probably want to somehow deploy the created artifacts.
• Deployment: Actually, I'm looking for a solution of copying the artifacts, which actually are a P2 repository, to some download or update site. Of course, this could be achieved by Maven plugins or Ant tasks, however, the crucial point is how to pass some credentials (user name, pass word) to the build system. Especially if you are building an open source project, you do not want to write this information into the maven script. Seems as if this is a common problem. If this problem were solved by Travis, it would be the best solution, at least for github projects.

Actually, it is very hard to determine the features of the different solutions. Many projects seem to be in a very early stage, and some projects announced are already gone (e.g., Mike CI). Most projects are cloud based, some use Amazon EC2 and users need their own Amazon EC2 account. For open source projects, it is often required to fill out some request form, and I don't know whether all projects are accepted.

Leave me a comment if you have any experience with a solution listed above, or if you know of other hosted CI systems.

Dreaming of an Eclipse Plugin-Store...

or how to sell little tools for little money...

A while ago, I wrote a little tool for exporting UML-like diagrams for Java classes and packages to OmniGraffle. I blogged about that tool and, from my statistics, it got downloaded over 100 times. I also announced that the tool will stop working in 2012, which it actually did. As I wrote in the announcement of the tool, based on the feedback I wanted to decide whether to continue developing the tool or not.

So, what is the feedback after almost six months? There were a few comments, and about 150 downloads according to my logs. Although I installed a donate and Flatter button on my blog, I received no money at all. The natural consequence would be to stop developing (and providing) the tool.

Today, someone posted a comment as the tool has stopped working (just as announced). The commenter also wrote that he needs the tool to create some diagrams for him. Hmm... As I'm trying to be a good guy, I published an update of the tool working until June 2012.

I won't complain about people not giving any feedback or money voluntary. Instead I'm wondering how to make the tool available for a small amount of money. Actually, I don't know about any Eclipse tools to be sold for a couple of dollars/euros, except Log4E. Most tools are either freely available, or they are really expensive. Log4E comes in two versions: A free community edition and a so called "Pro" version for only €7,50. I have purchased that tool a long time ago, rather to support the author than urgently needing the additional features of the Pro version. However, due to the lack of Eclipse supporting this kind of "business model", it is rather complicated to install the license key (and keep it up to date with new Eclipse installations), and I figure managing licenses and payments to be time-consuming for the author as well.

Apple, and also Google, have successfully created systems enabling authors of software to make (little) money by selling there products very easily. Although I don't like the Apple way of approving software, I'm wondering if some kind of "Eclipse PluginStore" would be a good idea. People spend a lot of money on "apps", including a lot of small games. If buying a commercial Eclipse plugin would be as simple as purchasing an iPhone/Android app, would people do that? And how many programmers would publish their tools then? Maybe combining that kind of store with a BugStore (see "Should We Pay for Eclipse Bug Fixes?" for a summary of a discussion taken place in April 2010) would be a good idea as well...

As long as there is no Eclipse PluginStore available: How do you sell your tools?

GEF3D goes Git, Maven/Tycho, and Hudson

or
Standing on the shoulders of giants

Abstract: Setting up a continuous integration build based on Git, Maven/Tycho, and Hudson is surprisingly easy. I assume that this is no real news for most readers. However, I ways very skeptical about that, especially because of all the project dependencies. So, this posting is meant for readers hesitating to set up an automatic build system because they think that it would be too complicated, just as I thought until .. well, until now.

One of the things on my todo list of 2011 was to set up a continuous integration build for GEF3D. I did set up such a system several years ago, using some XML files describing a module and its dependencies, and an XSL Transformation generating Ant scripts based on these module descriptions. In order to run nightly builds, cron was used -- yeah, good old times. I remember trying Maven back then, and I was so much disappointed that I wrote my own tools. Due to this experience, I had lots of respect setting up a build system for GEF3D.

In the beginning, Miles helped me to set up a Buckminster based build. He had some experience with this tool because his build system for the AMP project is based on Buckminster as well. Since Miles has switched to Git, he suggested the GEF3D project to switch as well. This would simplify the set up, as we only have to deal with one version control system. I filed a bug report for moving GEF3D from SVN to Git. Since I had read in the Git Migration guide that when moving to Git it would also be a good opportunity to refactor the structure of the project, we decided to introduce folders separating plugins, features, examples, and so on. Somehow my report got forgotten... As it was very complicated to configure the Buckminster build, and due to other things, I also didn't push it.

Migrate to Git

So, as the year is reaching its end, I decided to give it another try -- despite all these unknown tools such as Buckminster, Git, and Hudson. I started with Git. The first giants I have to give kudos to are the Eclipse Git guys, and Stefan, who wrote a nice blog posting about how he moved CDO to Git. The basic idea of Stefan's approach is really simple:

1. Create a Git repository locally and use svn2git to migrate the code. Note that there exist different svn2git tools. I used https://github.com/nirvdrum/svn2git, while Stefan used https://github.com/schwern/svn2git.git! The import is a single command, in my case
   

   svn2git https://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.gef3d --authors users.txt

   users.txt is a list of the committers, with username = prename surname <email>. Very simple, indeed. Since GEF3D is not that big, the migration requires only 10 minutes, and the created Git repository has a size about 9 MB.
   
2. Then I refactored the project structure, simply done via command line: git mv is your friend here. (Kristian helped me with little problems, as I'm a Git rookie as well ;-) ).
   
3. Commit all changes to the local Git repository, pack the ".git" repository, upload it to developer.eclipse.org and let the webmaster unpack it at git.eclipse.org.
   

Stefan had to do much more work, as he had to create four repositories by extracting things from the existing CDO project, which is much bigger than the GEF3D project, of course. You will find the GEF3D git repository at git://git.eclipse.org/gitroot/gef3d/org.eclipse.gef3d.git

Maven/Tycho

During my research about some Git questions, I stumbled over the GMF tooling project (well, I know that project for a long time, but I didn't cared about the "internal" structure). It uses the same project structure as the GEF3D team had decided to be used for GEF3D, and it uses Tycho. Although I had my (bad) experiences with Maven, I gave Tycho a try. And again, I was very much surprised at how easy it is to set up a complete build system with Maven/Tycho. I used the GMF tooling poms as a template, and after a couple of minutes (not hours!) I had a build system which could build most parts of GEF3D. Kudos to the Tycho giant team! Besides some special Eclipse packaging things, e.g., telling Maven how to handle an Eclipse plugin (and probably much more hidden under the hud), one really nice feature is the ability to use P2 repositories as Maven repositories. GEF3D has dependencies to GEF, GMF and EMF. To resolve these dependencies, I only had to define a single repository:

<repository>
    <id>Galileo</id>
    <layout>p2</layout>
    <url>http://download.eclipse.org/releases/galileo</url>
</repository>  

This is so cool!
Unfortunately, LWJGL (the OpenGL wrapper library used by GEF3D) does not provide a p2 repository, but an old style update site instead. That is, its update site provides only the site.xml file, and no p2 metadata. By accident, I'm the guy maintaining the LWJGL update site build script. It is an Ant based build, added to the overall LWJGL build system. Since LWJGL does not use Maven, and no Eclipse at all, I could not rely on the Tycho or p2 publisher to build the p2 metadata. In order to keep the overhead for the LWJGL project low, I wrote my own Ant task creating the missing p2 metadata for an old style update site. If you ever need something like this, the code of this Ant task is available from the LWJGL SVN -- it is a plain Java Ant task without any Eclipse dependencies. It can also be used standalone in order to create the content.xml/jar and artifact.xml/jar from a bunch of plugins, features, and a site.xml. At the moment, the official LWJGL update site is not updated yet and I'm using a personal mirror for GEF3D. But Brian, who maintaines the LWJGL update site, will probably update it soon.

Remark: The LWJGL update site provides the LWJGL plugin, which basically bundles LWJGL as an Eclipse plugin. Additionally, source and documentation bundles are provided, and a tool bundle with an information view (showing the OpenGL settings of your graphics card), and a library for easily configuring standalone LWJGL apps. And thank you very much, Brian, for maintaining the update site at lwjgl.org!

I also had to fight with Maven and Tycho to get the source and documentation bundles build (seems as if some tiny things were changed when Tycho moved to Eclipse, so you have to compare the settings in the documentation with actual poms). Thanks to Chris' Minerva project, and the GMF tooling project, I could solve these issues. The Minerva project also demonstrates how to configure tests (simple JUnit tests, and plugin tests with SWT bot) -- and it was easy to configure this for GEF3D as well. Although I'm still curious about Buckminster, I was really surprised how well Maven/Tycho works. And since it is already working, I won't switch to Buckminster. However, I could imagine that if you have special requirements, it would be easier to configure that with Buckminster. I'm currently tutoring a student setting up a Buckminster build system for a research project -- I'm looking forward to comparing the results.

Hudson

Eventually, I had to set up a Hudson job for the GEF3D build. Miles had already prepared that job, and I only had to configure GEF3D's git repository, and Maven. I tried this first on a locally installed Hudson ("installed" sounds like a lot of work, actually it is only downloading a war and start Hudson via java -jar hudson.war). Again, setting up a Hudson job for a Maven based build system is really easy. All you have to do is to specify your code repository (git in my case), and the parameters passed to Maven (which usually is "clean install"). That's it. Well, at the moment I have some problems building the javadoc API reference, as the Javadoc at hudson.eclipse.org apparently behaves a little bit different as the Javadoc on my local machine. But at the moment I can ignore that problem, and I'm sure this can be solved soon.

Summary

I was really surprised at how easy it was to migrate from SVN to Git, to set up a build system with Maven/Tycho, and to configure the job with Hudson. As a matter of fact it was that easy, that I probably will use Git, Maven/Tycho, and Hudson for new projects right from the start (I know, that's what all the agile guys tell you to do... but I didn't dare to actually do it). I was particularly surprised at how good Maven works with Eclipse thanks to Tycho -- the Tycho team did a really great job here! According to Leonard, there's a crack in everyting... and I'm a little bit nervous about configuring special requirements with Maven, such as integrating code transformation tools. I've found some blog posts about getting Xtext/Xtend work with Maven -- seems as if there are reasons to being nervous... but that's how the light comes in :-D

Java To OmniGraffle

If you ask developers using Mac OS X about their favorite diagramming tool, you will often get the same answer: OmniGraffle. I also like OmniGraffle very much, and I'm still wondering what makes this tool so much better then all the GEF based editors.

When I have to create diagrams for documenting some Java code, I used to manually draw an UML like class diagram with OmniGraffle. This is an error prone process, and a boring one as well. So, I tried to find a better solution. Since I didn't find any existing tool, I wrote a small Eclipse plugin my self. It automatically generates OmniGraffle class diagrams from existing Java code.

Its usage is very simple: Open or create a drawing in OmniGraffle. Then switch back to Eclipse and select "Create OmniGraffle Diagram" from the context menu of a package in the package explorer, as shown in Figure 1. Configure the output, as shown in Figure 2. The plugin will scan the package and add a class diagram of this package to the front most drawing opened with OmniGraffle. Figure 3 shows the result created by the plugin without any manual changes. It is a visualization of the package "ReverseLookup" of GEF3D.

Fig. 1: Context menu entry

Fig. 2: Configuration Dialog

Fig 3: Created class diagram

At this moment, the plugin can only create class diagrams for a single package. Update: The plugin can create class diagrams for selected types, packages, and sub packages. Besides, the context of selected classes, that is types on which the selected types depend on, can be visualized as well. Attributes are drawn as associations if possible, parameterized collection types are recognized and replaced by 0..* associations. You can configure the output with some switches. Besides filtering members based in their scope, I have added some "filters" I often use when I draw diagrams manually:

• Getter and setters can be omitted
• Methods implementing or overriding methods of interfaces or classes already shown in the diagram can be omitted as well
• In order to better see relations between classes, you can force to draw all associations, even if they would be filtered out by the scope filter.

The newly created shapes are initially drawn using OmniGraffle's hierarchical layout algorithm.

Tip: In order to manually change the diagram, you may want to have a look at my collection of UML shapes at Graffletopia.

You can install the plugin via the update site:

http://jevopi.de/updatesite/de.jevopi.JavaToOmniGraffle

This is an beta alpha version, which will expire 2012. If you find this plugin useful, flattr me! Or leave me a comment below. Depending on the feedback, I will continue developing the plugin -- or not ;-)

In the preferences, you can set the default configuration settings and define the name of your OmniGraffle installation (however, the plugin tries to find the latest installed version automatically).

Last but not least: Of course, this plug is only available on Mac OS X, since OmniGraffle is a native Mac application. The communication between Eclipse and OmniGraffle is done via AppleScript, which is very easy thanks to Peter Friese's blog post.

(At Stackoverflow, someone estimated a tool for creating OmniGraffle diagrams from Eclipse UML2 based models would require 18 months development effort. Well, I needed less then 18 hours. But I only convert Java packages to class diagrams... ;-) ).

Update 2011-11-01:

1. Besides packages, selected types and sub packages can be visualized.
2. The context of visualized types can be visualized. That is, types on which the selected types depend on, such as super classes, can be rendered additionally to the selected classes. These context types are rendered in gray.
3. The default package is now handled as well (see comment by mathpup).

It's full of classes!

"The thing's hollow---it goes on forever---and---oh my God!---it's full of stars!" (Arthur C. Clarke: 2001. A Space Odyssey)

When I presented GEF3D in the past, people often ask me if it will scale, that is if a large number of items could be displayed. Well, the following screencast, inspired by Kubrick's great movie, shows a flight through the JDK. That is, every package of the 1.000 packages contained in the JDK is visualized as a plane in 3D space. On that plane, the classes are displayed---in total, more than 20.000 classes and interfaces are shown that way. Since the whole demo is a more or less a performance test, the classes are not really layouted yet. Also, only intra-package generalizations and implementations are shown yet.



The flight is sometimes a little bit bumpy. However, flying through 20.000 elements is more or less the worse case. Usually, the camera is moved in a specific area, and only sometimes a tracking shot may be used to "fly" to the next interesting area. As you will notice at the very beginning of the video, the camera is moving quite smoothly. Well, there is still room for improvement ;-)

Note that the video does not only demonstrate the overall performance of GEF3D, but also some of its features:

• the whole flight through the package tube is a single GEF3D tracking shot
• note the high quality font rendering
• level-of-detail (LOD) techniques are implemented in two ways:
  • fonts are either rendered as texture or vector font, depending on the distance of the text to the camera
    
  • packages are painted empty, with only the name of the package, or with their content, depending on the distance to the camera. This kind of LOD technique is not part of GEF3D yet, but it can easily be added.
• actually, you see 1.000 GEF editors, combined into a single 3D multi editor

When your MWE2 workflow is not working...

MWE2 is a kind of Ant for model related tasks. Xtext is using MWE2, and I also use it to run my own Xpand generator templates. It's a nice tiny tool, and one of the nice things is that it runs in its own JVM, so you can easily extend MWE2 with new components which resides in your project. When MWE2 is started, the project settings, i.e. the classpath (including all information from the plugin dependencies), are passed to the workflow. Unfortunately, this may produce problems which are really hard to find, mostly because the error message do not really tell you where to find the actual problem. Here is a list of some problems I have run into several times (using Eclipse 3.6 and Xtext/Xpand 1.0.1). Note that all the problems mentioned and fixed below may be caused by other reasons, requiring other fixes.

Problems instantiating module

Error message:

Error message in console:

1    [main] ERROR mf.mwe2.launch.runtime.Mwe2Launcher  - Problems instantiating module ...
...
Caused by: org.eclipse.emf.mwe.core.ConfigurationException: The platformUri location '......' does not exist 

Possible fix:

Fix projectName in MWE2 file.

I run into this problem after renaming a project. Ensure the project name defined in your MWE2 file

var projectName = ".."

matches the actual project name. This line is present in Xtext related MWE2 files.

Couldn't find module with name

Error message:

Error message in console:

ERROR mf.mwe2.launch.runtime.Mwe2Launcher  - Couldn't find module with name ...

Possible fix:

Create missing src-gen folder.

I run into this problem after checking out a project from a code repository. Since we do not add generated code to the repository, the src-gen folder was not added to the repository. Hence, it was not present after having checked out the project. However, it is configured in the build.properties. This seems to lead to a problem when the classpath is computed, so that the src folder is not added to the classpath either. Since the MWE2 file resides in the src folder, is is not found and, consequently, the module is not found. I was able to fix this problem by simply creating the src-gen folder. In order to not cause this problem again, I have added the src-gen folder to the repository and ignore only its content.

Workflow definition is ignored

Error message:

None. However, the selected workflow is completely ignored. It seems as if another workflow is executed.

Possible fix:

Ensure module name of workflow, that is the first line in MWE2 file

module ..

is unique.

This seems to be a typical copy- and paste error. Actually, in deed another workflow is executed. Although one can run an MWE2 file via "Run as../MWE2 workflow", the launcher does not directly call the actual workflow file. Instead, the name of the module is read and then the internal representation of this module is been executed. If you define two of more workflows with the same module name, only one of these modules is actually present (there seems to be some kind of map from module name to module).

Couldn't resolve reference to JvmType 'Workflow'.

Error message:

Error in MWE2 workflow file:

Couldn't resolve reference to JvmType 'Workflow'.

When you try to run the workflow, the following message appears:

Please put bundle 'org.eclipse.mwe2.launch' on your project's classpath.

Possible fix:

Ensure Plug-in Dependencies are correctly added to classpath.

This error can be caused by at least one of the following problems:

• your project is not an OSGi/Plug-in project. This can be fixed by converting the (Java) project to a Plug-in project.
• as printed in the dialog, ensure 'org.eclipse.mwe2.launch' to be listed in the plug-in dependencies

While these are obvious reasons for the error, in my case I had configured the project as plug-in project and 'org.eclipse.mwe2.launch' was defined in the dependency list. However, it still didn't worked. This may be caused because I renamed the project, and probably something had gone wrong. I noticed the problem only because the Package Explorer didn't showed the entry "Plug-In Dependencies". I assume there may be some corrupt cache entries. I only was able to fix this problem by creating a new plug-in project and moving the content of the broken project into the new one.

Weird errors when generating the parser etc.

Error message:

When running the Xtext MWE2 workflow to generate the code from your grammar, weird errors occur indicating problems in your grammar.

Possible fix:

Increase memory in MWE2 runtime configuration.

I stumbled over this problem twice, and it is really annoying since it is very hard to find the reason. If the parser generator runs out of memory, it crashes at some arbitrary position and randomly creates error messages. Since it usually happens in the parser generator, the error messages always indicate problems in your grammar, although your grammar may be perfectly ok. So, if you got any grammar problems which are not that obvious real grammar problems, ensure to set VM argument "-Xmx1024m" in the MWE2 runtime configuration.

Disclaimer: This is more a personal note, and some problems may be fixed in the meantime. Feel free to tell me if I got something wrong here :-)

Implement toString with Xtext's Serializer

Xtext uses EMF to generate the model API of the abstract syntax tree (or graph) of a DSL. For all implementation classes, the toString() method is generated. For a simple model element, this default implementation returns a string looking similar to this:

my.dsl.impl.SomeElement@67cee792 (attr1: SomeValue)

Well, this is not too bad. However this looks completely different to my DSL syntax, which may look like this:

SomeValue { 
    The content;
}

Especially for debugging and logging, I prefer that DSL like output. Since Xtext does not only generates a parser for reading such a text, but also a seralizer for creating the text from a model, I was wondering if that mechanism could be used for the toString method as well. (Actually, Henrik Lindberg pointed out the serializer class -- thank you, Henrik!)

In the following, I describe how to do that. Actually, this is a little bit tricky, and it will cover several aspects of Xtext and the generation process:

• use the generated serializer for formatting a single model element
• tweak the generation process in order to add a new method
• define the body of the newly added method

We will do that by adding a post processor Xtend file, which adds a new operation to the DSL model elements. The body of the operation is then added using ecore annotations. But first, we will write a static helper class implementing the toString method using the serializer.

Use the serializer

Xtext provides a serializer class, which is usually used for writing a model to an Xtext resource. The Serializer class (in org.eclipse.xtext.parsetree.reconstr) provides a method serialize(EObject obj), which returns a String---this is exactly what we need. This class requires a parse tree constructor, a formatter and a concrete syntax validator. Thanks to google Guice, we do not have to bother about these things. Xtext generates everything required to create a nicley configured serializer for us. What we need is the Guice injector for creating the serializer:

Injector injector = Guice.createInjector(new  my.dsl.MyDslRuntimeModule());
Serializer serializer = injector.getInstance(Serializer.class);

Now we could simply call the serialize method for a model element (which is to be an element of the DSL):

String s = serializer.serialize(eobj);

Since this may throws an exception (when the eobj cannot be successfully serialized, e.g., due to missing values), we encapsulate this call in a try-catch block. Also, we create a helper class, providing a static method. We also use a static instance of the serializer.
Since this helper class is only to be used by the toString methods in our generated implementation, we put it into the same package.

package my.dsl.impl;

import org.eclipse.emf.ecore.EObject;
import org.eclipse.xtext.parsetree.reconstr.Serializer;
import com.google.inject.Guice;

public class ToString {
 private static Serializer SERIALIZER = null;

 private static Serializer getSerializer() {
  if (SERIALIZER == null) { // lazy creation
   SERIALIZER = Guice.createInjector(new my.dsl.MyDslRuntimeModule())
        .getInstance(Serializer.class);
  }
  return SERIALIZER;
 }

 public static String valueOf(EObject eobj) {
  if (eobj==null) {
   return "null";
  }
  try {
   return getSerializer().serialize(eobj);
  } catch (Exception ex) { // fall back:
   return eobj.getClass().getSimpleName()+'@'+eobj.hashCode();
  }
 }

}

Post processing

Now we have to implement the toString() method of our model classes accordingly. That is, instead of the default EMF toString method, we want to call our static helper method for producing the String.

A generic solution, which can not only be applied for adding the toString method but for all kind of operations, is to use a post processor extension (written in Xtend) to add new operations to the generated ecore model. The overall mechanism is described in the Xtext documentation. We have to write an Xtend extension matching a specific naming convention: <name of DSL>PostProcessor.ext. In our exampel that would be MyDslPostProcessor.

The easy thing is to add a new operation to each classifier:

import ecore;
import xtext;

process(GeneratedMetamodel this) :
 this.ePackage.eClassifiers.addToStringOperation();

create EOperation addToStringOperation(EClassifier c):
    ... define operation ... ->
 ((EClass)c).eOperations.add(this);

For defining the operation, we need:

• the return type of the operation
• the body of the operation

The return type is an EString (which will result in a simple Java String). In EMF, we have to set the type via EOperation.setEType(EClassifier). That is, we need the classifier of EString. With Java, this would be no problem: EcorePackage.eINSTANCE.getEString().
Unfortunately, we cannot directly access static fields from Xtend. At least, I do not know how that works. Fortunately, we can substitute EcorePackage.eINSTANCE with calling a static method of EcorePackageImpl. This static method can then be defined as a JAVA extension in Xtend:

EPackage ecorePackage(): 
 JAVA org.eclipse.emf.ecore.impl.EcorePackageImpl.init();

Note that we return an EPackage instead of the EcorePackage. I assume this is necesssary because we use the EMF metamodel contributor and EcorePackage is not available then. We can now set the EString classifier as return type of the operation: setEType(ecorePackage().getEClassifier("EString"))

Now, we need the body of the operation. Ecore does not directly support the definition of a body, that is there is no field in EOperation for setting the body. Fortunately, we can exploit annotations for defining the body. The default EMF generator templates look for annotations marked with the source value "http://www.eclipse.org/emf/2002/GenModel". The key of the annotation must be "body", and the value of the annotation is then used as the body of the operation. In the body, we simply call our static helper method for producing the DSL-like string representation.

The complete post processor extensions looks as follows:

import ecore;
import xtext;

process(GeneratedMetamodel this) :
 this.ePackage.eClassifiers.addToStringOperation();

EPackage ecorePackage(): 
 JAVA org.eclipse.emf.ecore.impl.EcorePackageImpl.init();


create EOperation addToStringOperation(EClassifier c):
 setName("toString") ->
 setEType(ecorePackage().getEClassifier("EString")) ->
 eAnnotations.add(addBodyAnnotation(
  'if (eIsProxy()) return super.toString(); return ToString.valueOf(this);')) ->
 ((EClass)c).eOperations.add(this);

create EAnnotation addBodyAnnotation(EOperation op, String strBody):
 setSource("http://www.eclipse.org/emf/2002/GenModel") ->
 createBody(strBody) ->
 op.eAnnotations.add(this);
 
create EStringToStringMapEntry createBody(EAnnotation annotation, String strBody): 
 setKey("body")->
 setValue(strBody) ->
 annotation.details.add(this);

If you (re-) run the GenerateMyDSL workflow, the EMF toString() implementations are replaced by our new version. You can test it in a simple stand alone application (do not forget to call doSetup in order to configure the injector):

public static void main(String[] args) {
 MyDslStandaloneSetup.doSetup();
 MyElement = MyDslFactory.eINSTANCE.createElement();
 e.setAttr1("Test");
 e.setAttr2("Type");
 System.out.println(e.toString());
}

Closing remarks

You probably do not want to really replace all toString methods with the serializer output, as this would create rather long output in case of container elements. In that case, you can add the new operation only to selected classifiers, or use the (generated) Switch-class to further customize the output.

Although the solutions looks straight forward, it took me some time to solve some hidden problems and get around others:

1. How to create the serializer using the injector -- and how to create the injector in the first place
2. How to access a static Java method from Xtend without too much overhead. Would be great if static fields could be accessed from Xtend directly.
3. How to use the post processor with the JavaBeans metamodel contributor. If I switch to the JavaBeans metamodel, my extension didn't get called anymore.
4. I'm still wondering where "EStringToStringMapEntry" is defined. I "copied" that piece of code from a snippet I wrote a couple of months ago, and I have forgotten how I found that solution in the first place.
5. Sorry, but I have to say it: The Xtend version 1.0.1 editor is crap (e.g., error markers of solved problems do not always get removed). But I've heard there should be a better one available in version 2 ;-)