These days implementing code generators has become quite easy.
However, building professional tools supporting you in
- navigating back and forth between the sources and the generated text,
- running and debugging the source models instead of the generated artifacts, and
- transferring changes in the text back to the sources
is a much more challenging task, but also an interesting one.
In this talk you will get to know Xtext’s new tracing API, which assists you in collecting the mappings between the source models and their corresponding regions in the generated text. We will point out ways to build
- convenient navigation infrastructure,
- debugging support, and
- tool-based aids for porting changes in the generated artifacts back to the sources (believe it or not, changing generated artifacts is common practice in some domains)
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