Automatic Translation of OCL Meta-Level Constraints into Java Meta-Programs

International audienceIn order to make explicit and tangible their design choices, software developers integrate, in their applications' models, constraints that their models and their implemetations should satisfy. Various environments enable constraint checking during the modeling stage, but in most cases they do not generate code that would enable the checking of these constraints during the implementation stage. It turns out that this is possible in a number of cases. Environments that provide this functionality only offer it for functional constraints (related to the states of objects in applications) and not for architectural ones (related to the structure of applications). Considering this limitation, we describe in this paper a system that generates metaprograms starting from architecture constraints, written in OCL at the metamodel level, and associated to a specific UML model of an application. These metaprograms enable the checking of these constraints at runtime