EMF-IncQuery: An Integrated Development Environment for Live Model Queries

As model management platforms are gaining industrial attention, the importance of automated model querying techniques is also increasing. Several important engineering tasks supported by model-based tools – such as well-formedness constraint validation or model transformations – rely on efficiently evaluating model queries. If the models change rapidly or frequently, it is beneficial to provide live and incrementally evaluated queries that automatically propagate model changes to keep query results consistent.

The current paper reports on the of EMF-IncQuery framework focusing on new features of its integrated development environment (such as query validation and visualization) and its support for integrating queries to existing applications (e.g. by auto-generated data bindings) built on top of the industry standard Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Our approach is illustrated on a case study integrating well-formedness constraints to the Papyrus UML tool by live model queries of EMF-IncQuery with negligible additional manual programming effort.