FreeText editor for Concrete

Content assisted free text editor for Concrete metamodel

Concrete editor is powerful web-based DSL editor. It uses structured approach where appearance can be highly customized with HTML/CSS templates. Creation of a language is based on defining specific metamodel and optionally javascript plugins.

This project is simple free-text editor with code completion for Concrete metamodel. Main idea was to create language looks similar to natural language. It is not polished too much but it shows the concept. Source code is available on Concrete-Freetext project page. Some details about implementation you can find on DSL editor with code completion in Javascript entry on my blog.

Dedicated language to edit Concrete metamodel has been designed similar to natural language used in analysis activity. Basic sentence outline for an entity looks as <EntityName> (has <Attribute> as <Name> | contains <EntityName> as <Name> | has <Name> referring to <EntityName>)*. Below you have an example with definition of Statemachine metamodel.

Concrete metamodel result tree

No result tree.

Free text input

Statemachine
 has obligatory name as string,
 contains any number of variables as Variable,
 contains any number of triggers as Trigger,
 contains any number of states as State.
Variable
 has obligatory name as string.
Trigger
 has obligatory name as string.
State is abstract
 has obligatory name as string,
 contains any number of transitions as Transition.
SimpleState extends State.
CompositeState extends State
 contains any number of subStates as State.
Transition
 has obligatory target referring to State,
 has any number of trigger referring to Trigger,
 contains optional condition as Expression.
Expression.
AndExpression extends Expression
 contains at least 1 of expr1 as Expression,
 contains at least 1 of expr2 as Expression.
OrExpression extends Expression
 contains at least 1 of expr1 as Expression,
 contains at least 1 of expr2 as Expression.
NotExpression extends Expression
 contains at least 1 of expr as Expression.
VarRef extends Expression
 has obligatory variable referring to Variable.