Guidance for learning

Before diving into this manual, we recommend you first familiarize yourself with the following other resources:

1)	Walk-through the separate Evaluation tutorial (Family Tree example) to familiarize yourself with the MetaEdit+ environment and its metamodeling and modeling functionality. The material from this tutorial is used extensively as examples throughout this manual.
2)	Read Chapters 2 and 6 of the separate MetaEdit+ User’s Guide for more information about the basic principles of MetaEdit+.
3)	Examine the separate Watch example manual to get a full-blooded overview of the possibilities of metamodeling and MetaEdit+ Workbench. This material is also used as an example in this manual.

With that background in place, you will be well positioned to read this manual. Feel free to skim parts that are sufficiently familiar e.g. from the Evaluation tutorial, and concentrate on other parts that you are currently working on.

4)	Read Chapters 1, 2 and 3 from this manual to learn the usage of those metamodeling tools you need to use the most. These include conceptual modeling tools that are used to create element types and the Symbol Editor that is used to create graphical representations for element types.
5)	Read Chapter 5 and skim Chapter 6 to become familiar with MetaEdit+ generator creation and debugging environment and the MERL generator definition language. As MERL and generation languages in general will be new to most, we particularly recommend the MERL Primer in Section 5.2.
6)	Read Chapters 4 and 7 to learn to use additional metamodeling tools like the Dialog Editor, Metamodel Browser and Type Manager.
7)	Read Chapters 8, 9 and 10 for information about external interfacing provided by the API, import/export features and command line parameters.

MetaEdit+ Workbench is a dynamic product under continual improvement, and there may occasionally be some differences between what is described in the printed manual and what is found in the current version. The latest versions of the manuals are available from MetaCase.

Conventions

Throughout the manual, you will find special notes and comments that point out important features and characteristics of the MetaEdit+ Workbench environment. These notes are printed in italics and are marked by an arrow (→) in the left margin. The steps required for performing various functions are indented and numbered: 1), 2), 3) etc.

List dialogs and keyboard search

MetaEdit+ makes extensive use of list dialogs for selecting among elements. To quickly select a known element in a list, simply type the first few letters of that element’s name when the dialog opens. This moves the cursor to the first element whose name begins with those letters. Pressing Enter will choose the current framed element, closing the dialog. Pressing Space selects the current framed element, and resets the typed buffer, so you can start typing a different name. You can also double click an element to choose it and close the dialog.

To move to the next matching element, press Alt+Down, or Alt+Up/Home/End for the previous/first/last match. To include a Space in the search string (or other reserved character like Enter, or *, +. – for tree widgets), hold down Alt while you type the character. Searching like this also works in the focused widget elsewhere: lists, trees, property tree sheets and Table Editor (but not other multi-column data sets).

Some dialogs allow multiple selections: use Shift-click or Shift-Space to select a contiguous section of the list, and Ctrl-click or Ctrl-Space to select or deselect individual elements. Again, a double click first performs the selection operation (modified by Shift or Ctrl keys), and then closes the dialog.

The Windows user interface standard prevents resizing of modal dialogs, which can make life difficult if all the necessary information is not visible in the default size. To help in such situations, MetaEdit+ includes a triangular resize corner at the bottom right of most dialogs. By clicking and dragging the resize corner, you can resize the dialog window to be larger.