A rule in xText called "Component" will typically generate a class "Component" in the src-gen folder. I would like to add additional methods to these classes without them being overridden every time I make minor changes to the DSL. What's the proper way to inject my own code into these classes and is there a way to make all classes extend my own root class instead of the default EObject?
Thanks in advance.
You basically have two choices:
You can use a IXtext2EcorePostProcessor to modify the EMF-model which Xtext inferred from your grammar. The actual code generation is done by EMF, so you have to fiddle your code through that bottleneck. The details are described in a blog of Christian Dietrich. This approach is only suitable for small modifications.
You can use the "generation gap pattern" (a.k. "implementation gap pattern") which allows you the write classes which derive from the generated model classes. Here you can add anything you want. The details are described in a blog of Heiko Behrens. This approach is better suited for large scale modifcations by inheritance.
You may of course mix the two approaches...
