Friday, June 01, 2007

User Driven Modelling

In order to make user driven modelling and programming possible, it is essential that a communication mechanism is established, which allows users to generate changes and receive changes generated by the modelling system.


Types of Change


There are two types of change that can be applied to the model driven programming system, User Generated, and Model Generated.


User Generated


Figure 1 shows a user initiating a change, which is to delete a node from the bottom left and attach a new node to a branch in the top tight. The tree is translated to structured text, and this is further translated to Code.


User Generated Change.


Figure 1 - User Generated Change


For the second user generated change shown in figure 2 an object represented by a tree is visualised as a diagram. The user can amend either the diagram or the tree, in either case the change is filtered to the alternative representation and translated to the structured text and code.


User Generated Change, Alternative Interfaces.


Figure 2 - User Generated Change, Alternative Interfaces


Model Generated


A model generated change is initiated by the model itself, which changes the code and the structured text in response to a calculation (that may have been requested by the user). The model passes a translated result tree to the user interface to let the user know that the recalculations have been finished, and give the user the results using a suitable visualisation. This is shown in figure 3.


Model Generated Change.


Figure 3 - Model Generated Change


More Information on this research is available on my Website at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/.


and on my End user programming page at http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/EndUserProgramming.htm.

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