Re: Importing Umbrello XMI files

On Wednesday, 2. May 2007 17:42, Anastasios Hatzis wrote:
>
> I'm the author of the light-weight MDA tool pyswarm  
> [...]

Nice.

> For doing this I want to learn the differences between the XMI formats of
> the UML tools. As far as I understand this is not easy, but I hope it will
> be possible with a reasonable effort.
>
> Thus I would like to know which UML and XMI versions Umbrello can export
> and which it can import (and eventually which Umbrello version).

Umbrello's file format mostly conforms to XMI 1.2.

> And I would like to learn if there are significant differences or
> incompleteness to what the corresponding standards specify.

There are a few differences among tools in the way associations
are saved. Umbrello does not forward declare the <UML:Association>
at each participating classifier - it currently does this only for
generalizations/realizations.

Also there are differences with scoping (namespaces.)
For example, StarUML and Umbrello declare a <UML:Model>
at the outermost level and inside that, further nested <UML:Model>s
for each of the Logical, UseCase, Component, Deployment view.
Other tools just declare everything directly in the <UML:Model>.

> And, finally, I would like to know how stable the format(s) is/are.

Fairly stable, as can be seen by the lack of activity at
 http://bugs.kde.org/56184 .
Nobody has yet volunteered to implement XMI 2.x support.
I've been wanting to add TagDefinition/TaggedValue support
but haven't been finding the time.

> I will build a test model with Umbrello which covers the features
> (eventually with work-arounds) I need to test with my generator, but it
> would help me a lot if you can provide me with the missing information.

Sounds like a good idea.
For testing Umbrello's XMI interoperability with other tools, I made the
same small model in each of Umbrello, ArgoUML, and StarUML, and then
compared their XMI output.

Good luck.

Oliver


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