Command Generation

Overview

• Commands are the foundation of modifications in GEF.
• They encapsulate changes to be done, and how these changes can be undone.
• See Dev Doc Commands for a good idea of how to structure your commands, to ensure proper testing.
• Our commands are located in seg.jUCMNav.model.commands

Command Generation

• Basically, you can generate commands anywhere. You must have access to a CommandStack and a meta model instance and you're ready to go.
• We use GEF commands because we're running them in GEF CommandStacks but if you were to write a simple command-line based application, it might be sufficient to use EMF commands and command stacks.
• In our application, most commands are instanciated in edit policies. The framework is built in such a way that edit parts receive requests that are passed on to edit policies, which generate commands and return them to the edit part for execution, in the framework.
• Our wizards also instanciate commands
  • The autolayout wizard generates and executes commands directly in the command stack to manipulate empty points or to resize/move elements.
  • The stub bindings dialog has its own internal command stack which runs the commands. This helps us manipulate only one model instance at a time and gives us the flexibility to undo all commands if the user cancels the dialog.
• Our test cases also instanciate commands. An interesting test suite would generate sequences of commands and execute them against one instance of the meta model. Furthermore, by executing in an instance of our plugin, it would verify that none of the code built on top of the metamodel (which is refreshed via EMF Notifications) throws any exceptions or freezes.

-- Main.JasonKealey - 05 Jul 2005