maintaining openEHR's online UML diagrams

Dear all,

most of you would be familiar with the online UML diagrams of the
reference model - at
http://www.openehr.org/svn/specification/TAGS/Release-1.0.1/publishing/architecture/computable/UML/uml_start_view.html

David Lloyd started building these some 2 years or more ago using the
MagicDraw tool, which appeared to be one of the better tools on the
market. The current version of the model is in MagicDraw 9.5 and can be
found at
http://www.openehr.org/svn/specification/TRUNK/architecture/computable/UML/MagicDraw/
David also had to (at my request) hack the publishing part of MagicDraw
to make it publish the tabular form of classes in a vaguely sensible
format - and these scripts will no longer work with later vresions of
MagicDraw. This tool is also of course a paying tool.

The MagicDraw tool has changed fairly radically in later versions and it
would be quite some work to upgrade the current expression of the model
to the latest version. Possibly we should consider other tools or
approaches to having online UML. Personally I have found every UML tool
I have tried lacking, and don't use them in any serious production sense
- I believe they are mainly useful for generating diagrams for
communication purposes like we do in openEHR rather than actually using
them in software building - thus from my point of view, the main
requirement here is an HTML tree that we can publish.

We will need to be able to continue to update the UML HTML since
modifications will be made to the reference model in coming releases.
Are there suggestions on how to do this? Are there offers from someone
in the community who could actually do it?

- thomas beale

Hi!

I have started an experiment working with openEHR UML using
Eclipse-based tools, see:
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/Experimental+generation+of+code+and+documentation+from+UML
The initial driving force for the experiment was creating a custom UML
diagram for our MIE2008 openEHR tutorial. Some recent corrections etc.
are not uploaded yet, but I'll try to do that on Monday.

Soon the next version of Eclipse will be official, and if I understand
things correctly there will be improved support for generics in the
UML2-related tools then. Let's have a serious look at tooling after
that release.

Best regards,
Erik Sundvall
erisu@imt.liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-227579

Erik Sundvall wrote:

Hi!

I have started an experiment working with openEHR UML using
Eclipse-based tools, see:
http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/dev/Experimental+generation+of+code+and+documentation+from+UML
The initial driving force for the experiment was creating a custom UML
diagram for our MIE2008 openEHR tutorial. Some recent corrections etc.
are not uploaded yet, but I'll try to do that on Monday.

Soon the next version of Eclipse will be official, and if I understand
things correctly there will be improved support for generics in the
UML2-related tools then. Let's have a serious look at tooling after
that release.
  

thanks Erik,
that's a good start. Now, of course the problem is that whatever the
next tool we choose, we need to get the current model into it. We can
generate XML 1.3 I think it is from MagicDraw, but no better. Some
manual work will be needed.

- thomas