Component Identification

Basic concepts

Rationale

TODO: unique identifiers for entities like structural components, really making sure that an entity is the same as another in distributed team work

Use cases

TODO

• Management of shared modelling concepts using export/import or shared repository
• Full-featured inspection of old versions
• Version comparison analysis tools

Technical details

• A unique identifier can be attached to any resource with the L0.identifier relation:

    >-- L0.identifier <R L0.HasProperty : L0.FunctionalRelation
        L0.HasLabel "Identifier"
        --> L0.GUID

• The version identifier is a binary GUID and its values can be handled using the utility bean class org.simantics.datatypes.literal.
• Identifiers are only given to structural configuration components and composites in a model configuration, not diagram elements. This makes it possible to perform global comparisons between versions of a model.
• GUIDs are written into the standard dependencies Lucene index which means GUIDs can be used to find configuration resources.
• Original GUIDs are preserved in the following operations:
  • Cut-pasting content from one diagram to another
  • Diagram import with replace option
• Original GUIDs are rewritten in the following operations:
  • Diagram import with renaming
  • Diagram copy-paste

• Related code utilities:

class ModelingUtils:
    public static List<Resource> searchByGUID(ReadGraph graph, Resource indexRoot, GUID guid) throws DatabaseException
    public static List<Resource> searchByGUID(ReadGraph graph, Resource indexRoot, String indexString) throws DatabaseException
    public static void rewriteGUIDS(WriteGraph graph, Resource root, boolean deep) throws DatabaseException
    public static void createMissingGUIDs(IProgressMonitor monitor, WriteGraph graph, Collection<Resource> roots) throws DatabaseException