Description Miles Parker 2010-06-04 17:14:02 EDT

The EMF editor generator is supporting more and more targets, which is really exciting, but creates a challenge for developers targeting multiple IDEs. Currently if I want to for example support generation for two targets, whenever I need to generate a new target and/or make changes to the ecore / genmodel, I either need to:

1) Make changes in multiple genmodels and attempt to keep them in synch (which involves a lot of manual file comparison), or..
2) Duplicate the genmodel and then manually change all of the Model, Edit, Editor, Test plugin IDs and directories, etc..

This makes it especially difficult for an evolving model or just to try out a new target (like GWT!) because you have to do a fair amount of maintenance not to step on your existing targets.

My proposal is to support a single qualifier for genmodel that would be inserted into any name space references. For example, if this qualifier was "gwt", and Editor Plug-in ID were "mymodel.editor". generation would produce a "mymodel.editor.gwt" or perhaps "mymodel.gwt.editor" plugin.

As a more general issue, while model and edit can often be shared, it's not always clear where this is true. If it were the case that only the editor needed to be generated differently, that would make this pretty much a none issue.