Motivation

Visualizing the Object Constraint Language OCL the language Visual OCL offers a huge graphical integration jump for textual OCL Constraints belonging to UML diagrams. Each Visual OCL model has an underlying meta-model instance, which has already the meta-model parts of OCL and UML, so that a conversion to OCL is direct and precise. Therefore we can deduce the semantic of Visual OCL from the one of OCL itself. Besides an examination of syntactical correctness of the current model it is possible to check consistency belonging to a compound UML model.

 

Model Driven Architecture

Integrating visual models with semantic founded visual constraints by using editing and code-generating tools leads to a powerful instance of Model Driven Architecture MDA:

Using UML and Visual OCL for modelling opens the possibility to develop generators, which produce model code enriched with special code, gained from Visual OCL parts. These extensions could be for example test cases like JUnits.

Full language definition as diploma thesis

In 2005 Jessica Winkelmann completely defined the Visual OCL by both definition approaches - MOF with OCL constraints and on the other hand by a graph grammar. This work was done as a diploma thesis in German and will soon be available as a technical report too.