4.1.1 Visual Debugging with C#
As explained in Section
2.6, the visual debugging employs the
MetaEdit+ API to access the models during the application execution. To make
this possible, a few additions on the code generator side are required. First we
need the following three additions to ensure that we have a working connection
to the API and the required information to make the animation calls:
| 1) | Master
init: initializes the variable holding a port on the MetaEditAPI SOAP
service |
| 2) | AbstractWatchApplication
constructor: makes an MEOop reference for this
graph |
| 3) | AbstractWatchApplication
addStateOop: makes an MEOop reference for this state
object |
 | The
MEOop mentioned above is a data type for a variable holding a reference to a
model instance in MetaEdit+. For more information about API-specific data types
and the API in general, please refer to the Section 8 in ‘MetaEdit+
Workbench User’s
Guide’. |
To make the actual
animation calls to MetaEdit+, a further set of three additions are
needed:
| 4) | AbstractWatchApplication
handleEvent: handles the event of moving to a new state, calls
animate |
| 5) | AbstractWatchApplication
animate: calls Master animate with the graph and state
MEOop |
| 6) | Master
animate: calls port.animate |
These are the
modification required for the generated C# code. However, the Autobuild process
itself also requires a few modifications. To be able to establish the connection
with MetaEdit+ API, two things are needed: a Web Service Description Language
(WSDL) file that defines the interface for the available API commands and a
running API server at MetaEdit+’s end. Both of these needs are fulfilled
by the ‘_prebuild for C#: API’ subgenerator by internally executing
a few MetaEdit+ start-up commands. It will first use
saveWSDL: to write out the WSDL file
and ensure that the API server is running by executing
stopAPI and
startAPI.
Finally, the build process and C# project file must be
changed to link in the SOAP framework that will interface the C# code with the
MetaEdit+ API. The
vs.bat file is
augmented with commands that take care of building the SOAP interface for C#
from the generated WSDL file. Alternatively, if the
SvcUtil.exe required for this build is
not present, the batch file will use a minimum interface implementation using
specially generated
miniapi.cs and
miniapi.config files. Building the SOAP
interface methods will result in a set of new files that must be included into
the C# project file definition by the ‘_create Visual studio csproj-API
file’ subgenerator.
