The document discusses Acceleo Query Language (AQL), highlighting its motivation, syntax, and key features such as extensibility, strong typing, and integration with other Eclipse technologies. AQL is designed for efficiency during evaluation and offers a forgiving structure for users familiar with OCL. It has applications in Eclipse Sirius and M2Doc, among others, and is part of the Acceleo project since 2015.

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A Guided Tour of Eclipse Modeling, Monday, October 23, 2017
ACCELEO QUERY LANGUAGE
The small, fast & strong sidekick for your tooling

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our Motivation
Query language for Sirius

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our Motivation
Expressions in M2Doc

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our Motivation
Expressions in Acceleo-MTL

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our Motivation
Expressions in ALE (Action Language for EMF)

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Syntax :
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Familiar for any user of OCL
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Easily extensible
Language = Syntax + Semantic + Tooling + Runtime

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Syntax :
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Familiar for any user of OCL
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Easily extensible
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Semantics
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Statically typed
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Forgiving (null/unsetted values, collections)
Language = Syntax + Semantic + Tooling + Runtime

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Syntax :
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Familiar for any user of OCL
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Easily extensible
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Semantics
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Statically typed
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Forgiving (null/unsetted values, collections)
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Tooling
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Embeddable
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Statically typed with rich type inference
Language = Syntax + Semantic + Tooling + Runtime

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Syntax :
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Familiar for any user of OCL
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Easily extensible
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Semantics
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Statically typed
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Forgiving (null/unsetted values, collections)
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Tooling
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Embeddable
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Statically typed with rich type inference
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Runtime
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Fast, small, interpreted
Language = Syntax + Semantic + Tooling + Runtime

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self.eContainer(uml::Model).eAllContents()->select(a | a.name.startsWith(‘I’))

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not exactly OCL
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« . » and « » notation, select()→
✔ collect() and flatten() are implicit in AQL
(you won’t have a List of Sets)
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Optional variable denotation
✘ every expression starts with a var name
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Sequence, Set, Bag, OrderedSet
✘ Only Lists & Sets, and the order is
always stable across executions
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Types (uml::Class, family::Person...)
✔ are optional in a lambda
->select(a : family::Person| a.firstName.size > 10)
->select(a | a.firstName.size > 10)
✔ are union types
✔ are infered at validation time
✔ no need for cast

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Fast during evaluation, Smart during validation
Validation is optional

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Fast during evaluation, Smart during validation
(*) with Sirius 3.1, October 2015, optimizations happened since then

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Consistently Fast during evaluation
From „EMF-IncQuery: Blazing-fast reaction time even for very large diagrams (Sirius integration)“ by
Ákos Horváth, SiriusCon 2015, Paris

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Predicates analysis and union types

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Extensible with Java
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Included
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Operators semantics : ‘Hello’ + self.name
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Domain specific services

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The Runtime
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Dependencies
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13K lines of non generated Java code, 21K total (EMF API for AST)
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Is not a singleton

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How to get it ?
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Shipped since 2015 as part of the Acceleo project
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Documentation:
https://www.eclipse.org/acceleo/documentation/aql.html
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Other technologies already using it
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Eclipse Sirius
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M2doc (to generate .docx files from a model)
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ALE (Action Language for EMF)