As we mentioned in a former post, Bence, who is our colleague, has extended the validation rules embedded into YAKINDU Statechart Tools with new ones. The high-level purposes of the validation rules are to reduce the ambiguity and nondeterminism of the design models and to avoid bad design practises and structures.
Let’s see how it works in practise.
Let’s image we designed a statechart, that contains a composite state with two parallel regions as depicted on the next figure. Each region has two states, which are connected through transitions. Although most triggers are different in the two regions, there is a trigger, called Protocol.response, that is the same for both regions. Although these two transitions have the same trigger (Protocol.response) the respective actions are different: in the first first region Protocol.actionA, in the other region Protocol.actionB is the respective action. Since the execution order of transitions with the same trigger in parallel regions is undefined, it is a bad design pattern (so called antipattern).
Bence designed an EMF-IncQuery validation pattern to automatically recognize these kinds of design patterns. More on EMF-IncQuery validation patterns can be read in the respective blogpost here.
As the validation rules are evaluated incrementally by the EMF-IncQuery Validation Framework, warnings are showed in the Problems view of Eclipse. If we double click on a warning message, it automatically jumps to the respective model element, to help correct the error easily.
