Persiflage and Piffle

When starting a new model I seldom want to start from a blank canvas; instead I’d like to use a template to get us going. Within RSA/RSM there are already some templates provided, and whilst useful, they are (necessarily) very generic.

A simple way to enable this is to create a model from an existing model from the New UML Model wizard page.

Whilst this approach is workable for an ad-hoc approach to copying models, it’s far from ideal, especially in an environment where you would like your modelling team(s) to be using a consistent set of templates. A better approach would be to hook into the “Create model from standard template” mechanism. Whilst this isn’t particularly difficult to do, it doesn’t appear to be that well documented, with the only reference I found being a support page relating to RSA v6 (which is using an export wizard that doesn’t appear to be available in v7).

The way it’s done is by creating an Eclipse plug-in with an extension of the “com.ibm.xtools.modeler.ui.wizards.template” extension point. Under this extension you specify a directory which contains the model to be used as a template, an image to be used in the wizard page and a template definition file that pulls the whole thing together and provides some descriptive text.

Since I think that it’s likely that it’s likely there are people out wanting to do this who are not Eclipse plug-in developers, and in fact may not even be a developer (in the case of business analysts, for example). I’ve decided to write an article that goes through it in a lot more detail. Trust me, it’s simple, and you won’t need to write a single line of code.

Article: Create an RSA model template

Hopefully these days, most developers are aware of UML profiles and the value that they can add to a development team. As with other UML 2.x compliant modelling tools, IBM’s RSA tooling has direct support for the creation and deployment of profiles (including into an RSM install).

Although I’ve produced profiles before, I’d always lived with having to create a generic UML element and then apply the stereotype afterwards. If your profile is something that relates to domain in which you’re working, it’s likely that you will want to create these elements reasonably frequently. In this case, this long hand approach can become a little tiresome.

So, given that RSA is based on Eclipse, the platform that promotes extensibility, I wondered whether there would be a way to extend RSA’s modelling user interface. Not holding out much hope I had a quick look in the help - only to find that indeed it does.
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Adding domain specific semantics to a UML model is an incredibly useful thing to do. It enables early validation of thinking and ideally puts constraints onto the development teams that are required to help secure a sucessful delivery. It could also enable better code generation, but I’m not a fan of that!

Adding some validation constraints into the IBM Rational modelling tools is actually really quite easy, assuming that you’re not frightened of Java and Eclipse plugins. (Of course if you have no one in your team who isn’t frightened, perhaps you should just bite the bullet; it’s really not that hard you know )
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