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Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend

You're reading from   Implementing Domain-Specific Languages with Xtext and Xtend Learn how to implement a DSL with Xtext and Xtend using easy-to-understand examples and best practices.

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2016
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781786464965
Length 426 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Tools
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Author (1):
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Lorenzo Bettini Lorenzo Bettini
Author Profile Icon Lorenzo Bettini
Lorenzo Bettini
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Table of Contents (18) Chapters Close

Preface Preface to the second edition
1. Implementing a DSL FREE CHAPTER 2. Creating Your First Xtext Language 3. Working with the Xtend Programming Language 4. Validation 5. Code Generation 6. Customizing Xtext Components 7. Testing 8. An Expression Language 9. Type Checking 10. Scoping 11. Continuous Integration 12. Xbase 13. Advanced Topics 14. Conclusions
A. Bibliography
Index

Custom formatting

An editor for a DSL should provide a mechanism for rearranging the text of the program in order to improve its readability, without changing its semantics. For example, nested regions inside blocks should be indented, and the user should be able to achieve that with a menu.

Besides that, implementing a custom formatter has also other benefits, since the formatter is automatically used by Xtext when you change the EMF model of the AST. If you tried to apply the quickfixes we implemented in Chapter 4, Validation, you might have noticed that after the EMF model has changed, the editor immediately reflects this change. However, the resulting textual representation is not well formatted, especially for the quickfix that adds the missing referred entity.

In fact, the EMF model representing the AST does not contain any information about the textual representation, that is, all white space characters are not part of the EMF model (after all, the AST is an abstraction of the actual...

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