Business Rules Xtext Grammar

Question

At work we use a Business Rules language that was original designed for 'business' people to program but now has fallen on use, the programmers. The IDE/Eclipse plugin isn't what a we would call an 'IDE', but now that a Eclipse plugin has been added in the latest release of the standalone IDE we want to create a Eclipse Editor plugin with syntax coloring, checking etc.

I've been looking at Xtext tutorials but just can't seem to get a grasp on the concept of the grammarlanguage and was hopping if I provided some examples of the Business language someone could provide a grammarexample and some explanation and to what it was doing.

Examples:

    varString is a string initially "Dog"; //String - 'a' can be interchanged with 'an'

    varInteger is a integer initially 0; //Integer - 'a' can be interchanged with 'an'

    varObject is some MyObject initially MyObject.newInstance( "Foo" ); //Object Creation

    while ( varInteger < varObject.size() ) do {
         varTemp = methodCall( parm1,
                               parm2,
                               parm3, );

         varTemp1 = methodCallWithCast( parm1,
                                        parm2,
                                        parm3, ) as a MyObject; //'a' can be interchanged with 'an'
    }

    if ( varObject.size() > 0 ) then {
    }

    if ( varObject is not null and
         varObject.size() < 0 ) then {
    }

Note that the styling (spaces after/before the brackets, parameters on seperate lines) I'm hopping to be able to checking as this is the coding standard the we adhear to, and to throw an error if it is not followed

Thanks!

Ira Baxter Ira Baxter · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-27T04:45:51

You need to learn about BNF (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus%E2%80%93Naur_Form) so you can understand how grammar rules are written, and then you need to either find the reference document for your business rules languages, or write your own grammar rules. With that, you can then consider how XText might be configured to help you.

I suspect that given where you are in your understanding of language processing tools, integrating your business rules language into XText may be more than you are ready to do.

Business Rules Xtext Grammar

1 Answers