Declarative model constraints using OCL

A concept called Model Driven Architecture was launched in 2001 by the Object Management Group as a way of supporting Model Driven Engineering. The concept of using models to aid in the design of computer software is not new, however the use of models as a primary design artifact, and tools to automatically generate structural code from them is a newer approach. A typical problem however has been that while models generally give a good overview of structure and flow, it has been hard to express rules and constraints within the model. Statements like “for every yellow car in database table A there should be a driver with favorite color yellow in table B” were impossible to express within the scope of the model. This problem was tackled by the addition of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) into the most common metamodels. OCL is a declarative language used to define constraints on a model. In this thesis I have investigated the possibility to enforce model/data correctness using OCL in real life. The investigation was done implementing an OCL framework into the platform developed by my host company LucidEra Inc. Work has been done assessing where in the LucidEra platform stack application was possible as well as how it could be implemented and made usable. While the initial application attempts were deemed impossible within the given timeframe, the result of this work is an OCL implementation in an internal development tool. Deklarativ modellkontroll med hjälp av OCL