Description Christian Damus 2016-04-15 08:53:51 EDT

The model of element-type advice provides for constraints on the ordering of advice invocation, via the 'before' and 'after' attributes.  These are not Ecore references but string-valued attributes, and evidently they are the names of the classes implementing advices that the declaring advice should precede or follow, respectively.

You can see this in the JUnit test for ordering:

    oep.infra.types.tests.ElementEditHelperAdviceTests::testValidAdvicesOrder

in which the test element-types model has advices clearly indicating 'before' and 'after' constraints by class name, not the advice identifier that are very different to the class names.

This is unintuitive.  These attributes should indicate advices by identifier, for several reasons:

* advice identifiers are API, not the classes implementing them.  Class names are hidden behind the IDs
* many different advices are implemented by a single class.  The standard modelled advices for setting properties, applying stereotypes, etc. are all implemented by a single class which patently is not API.  So none of these advices can be specifically referenced by an ordering constraint