Acceleo Quickstart

Authors:	Laurent Goubet Laurent Delaigue
Contact:	laurent.goubet@obeo.fr, laurent.delaigue@obeo.fr

The goal of this document is to help you get started with Acceleo as fast as possible. No details, no explanations, just the facts!

We will assume you already have Acceleo installed in Eclipse; Installation instructions can be consulted on the official site. Eclipse itself can be downloaded from the Eclipse download site.

First of all, switch to the Acceleo perspective, which will make everything easier. Open the Window menu, then Open Perspective > Other... and choose Acceleo.

Create an Acceleo project, which will contain your first "Hello world" generator. Right-click in the package explorer, then select New > Acceleo Project.

../images/quickstart/acceleo_new_project.png

Call it org.eclipse.acceleo.helloworld or whichever name you like better, and click Next > then Finish on the next screen. By default, an Acceleo template called generate.mtl is created and opened.

Edit it so that it looks like the following (simply insert some text for the purpose of the demonstration):

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_module.png

Now, you need to run this template. In order to evaluate a generation module, you need to provide Acceleo with two pieces of information:

The input model;
The output folder.

Here we want to use an ecore model, so we'll create one very quickly. Of course, models are usually produced by software designers, architects, or developers, and generally not by the same people that write Acceleo modules.

So, let's create a new project since there's no reason for our models to be in the same project as our generator (in fact, a good practice would be to separate models from templates). Right-click in the package explorer, and select New > Project..., then Java Project.

Click on Next and enter the name of the project that will contain the model and the java code generated from this model. Something like org.eclipse.acceleo.test will be perfect! Do not switch to the java perspective when asked to.

Now let's create our ecore model. Right-click on the new project, and select New > Other....

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_uml_new0.png

In the wizard's page, type "ecore" in the top field to filter the choices, and select "Ecore Model". Click Next >.

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_uml_new1.png

Give a name to the ecore model to create, for instance Sample.ecore. Click Next >.

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_uml_new2.png

Select the root type to use for your model, here we will use "EPackage". Click Finish; this should create and open a new ecore model.

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_uml_new3.png

Now add one or more classes to the model. To do this, either you have a graphical ecore editor such as Ecore Tools installed, in which case you can use it, or follow these instructions:

Right-click on the root package and select Show Properties View
In the properties view, change the value of the name property to any name you wish for the package. Here we'll make it be tutorial.
Right-click on the package and select New Child > EClass;
In the properties view, enter a name for the new class, we'll name it Acceleo in this example.

Repeat these steps to create as many classes as desired.

Of course, this model is just a dummy to get you started. In real life, models will contain lots of information, but it is not our purpose here and now.

So you should now have a model that looks like this:

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_model.png

Let's run our generator against this model!

Right-click on the Acceleo module file (that is, the generate.mtl file) and select Run As > Launch Acceleo Application.

../images/acceleo_quickstart_launch1.png

The Acceleo launch configuration page opens, and you need to provide the information mentionned earlier.

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_launch2.png

Use the Browse... buttons to easily select the model and the destination folder (you will need to use *.ecore as filter instead of the default *.xmi in order to locate your model file).

The launch configuration page should now look like this:

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_launch3.png

Click on the Run button. A file named "Acceleo.txt" (or whatever name you used for your ecore class) appears in the target folder.

You can open it from the package explorer. Here is its content:

../images/quickstart/acceleo_quickstart_output_file.png

It contains the text Hello, Acceleo world!, in which Acceleo has been dynamically extracted from the ecore model (it is the class name), while the rest of the text is statically written in the template itself.

Now it's time to experiment by yourself! You should probably read the First Generator tutorial to further your comprehension but for now you know enough to get to know Acceleo by playing around with it a bit.