TextGenGen

TextGenGen is an MPS plugin for generation of TextGen definitions derived from Editor definitions, so that the text generated by TextGen is the same as the one rendered on the screen by the Editor.

Getting started

The plugin is distributed via the JetBrains MPS Marketplace. It is recommended to install the plugin from there.

However, if you want to make any modification to the plugin, you could find useful these guides:

To build the plugin:

• Define the TEXTGENGEN_HOME path variable
  • Go to File > Settings > Apppereance & Behavior > Path Variables
  • Add a new variable with the name TEXTGENGEN_HOME and the value of the path to the top-most directory of the TextGenGen project (e.g. C:\Users\yourName\MPSProjects\textGenGen)
• Open the TextGenGen project in MPS
• Expand the TextGeGEn.build item in the project explorer
• Right-click the TextGenGen item with a spider icon
• Trigger Run TextGenGen
• The plugin ZIP file is located in the directory hierarchy of the project (build/artifacts/TextGenGen)

To install the built plugin:

• Open MPS
• Go to File > Settings > Plugins > Install plugin from disk... and locate the ZIP archive
• After MPS restart, two options should appear in the context menu after right clicking on any module:
  • Save as text - Exports a textual representation of all nodes in a module as they are rendered on the screen
  • Generate TextGen - Generates TextGen definitions from Editor definitions

Release log

Changes brought by version 1.1, 11/2019:

• Fix spacing between elements of a ref-node list
• Add support for editor cells representing AST references
• Implementation of enumeration support
• Refactoring of deprecated parts

Major changes brought by version 1.0, 9/2019:

• Generation of TextGen removes the previously generated TextGen and does not ask for a prefix anymore
• Newly supported aspects of the Editor (so that the generated TextGen respects them):
  • Show if at an Editor cell
  • Editor components (the #alias# component too)
  • Empty cell models at a child reference list and/or a child reference
• Improved implementation of indentation and spacing generation
• Refactoring: redesign of the plugin core to a more pure form, documentation of the code

Version 0.4

• Support of simple Editor constructs
• The design is basically prepared to be extended by support of more complex Editor constructs

Development notes

Design overview

Plugin Core

The entry-point object of the plugin core is EditorToTextGenConvertor, which provides generation of TextGen for a given Editor. This object uses the EditorCellToTextGenConvertor object to generate TextGen chunks corresponding to individual Editor cells. This object uses the Gang-of-Four Builder pattern: it delegates generation of smaller, general chunks of the TextGen to the TextGenBuilder object.

TextGenBuilder is intended to be Editor-independent so it should not contain any knowledge of the Editor structure and should understand the TextGen structure only.

The utils virtual package contains some helper classes:

• CustomStyleContainer: A wrapper for styling from Editor cells
• Value, Constant, Query: Wrappers for (run-time evaluated) conditions
• NameProvider: A generator of unique identifiers
• StatementsBuffer: A holder for TextGen statements which executes some basic optimizations of the inserted statements
• Utils: General utility methods