Build a Domain Specific Language with DSL Tools
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This article, the first of two parts, will teach you how to build a visual designer with code generation. You will learn about the files that are used to define the concepts and notation for a Domain Specific Language, and many other details. In the second part, you will put the designer built in this part to work.
Objectives
For the purpose of this walkthrough, you will use the Domain Specific Language Tools for Visual Studio 2005 to build a graphical designer integrated into Visual Studio for your own domain specific language. The Domain Specific Language Tools ship as a separate download for Visual Studio. The DSL Tools are an SDK that allows you to use Microsoft’s generic modeling platform to build visual modeling tools that run inside of Visual Studio. The SDK contains code generation tools that will generate a running designer based on an XML description.
This lab explores how the Microsoft DSL Tools for Visual Studio 2005 can be used to build a visual designer with code generation. In this lab, you will learn more about the files that are used to define the concepts and notation for a Domain Specific Language, and the process that takes these files and generates a complete Visual Studio designer for that language. You will learn some of the options for defining different aspects of the concepts and notation, and how the notation is mapped to the concepts. You will see the various components that make up a complete Visual Studio designer, how these components are generated from the definition files, and understand how the designer solution is built. Finally, you will run the generated designer, and learn how to generate code and reports from the models that you create with it.
Estimated Time to Complete This Lab
60 Minutes
Exercise 1
Using the Distributed System Designers to Build and Validate Service-Oriented Systems
Scenario
The Sample Domain Specific Language: A Business Entity Language (BEL)
Visual domain specific languages can be used to specify business requirements. A common diagram type used in this area is Business Entity Diagrams. These diagram show the entities involved in a business process. Let’s assume we define a small domain specific language to capture the information we get from a conversation with a subject expert of a banking application.
We define a shape called “Business Entity”. Each entity has a set of attributes. For example, the business entity “bank account” might have attributes like “amount” and “credit line”. Business entities are related to each other, and we represent these relationships by lines between the business entity shapes. For example, the business entity “bank account” will be related to the business entity “customer”.
In addition to the structure of the business entities we define another shape called “business rule”, which captures parts of the business logic. We use the rules to describe how business entities are used together. For example, we have a business entity called “account” and we have a business entity called “transaction”, and we describe the business rules about how a transaction, which involves two accounts, gets approved.
For the hands-on lab we define a very simple version of the Business Entity language. A real production version would of course be much more fully-featured and integrated into the overall development lifecycle. Different artifacts might be generated from the completed language, including database definitions, message formats, and user interfaces for the business entities, and skeletons for business logic from the rules. In the lab you’ll see how to use the business entity model to generate a simple HTML report and a WinForms-based user interface.
Tasks Detailed Steps
Next: Design a service-oriented system >>
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