Domain-Specific Presentation is Component Visualization

Some time ago I was asked if actifsource provides a domain-specific presentation of domain-models. I had to answer this question with no. But what's the problem with a domain-specific presentation?

As I stated in this blog before, components are the building blocks of architecture. A component (derived from latin "componens") is something that is composed of different parts by its very nature.

Using different UML classes to visualize components is kind of silly, because the single parts of a component are structured hierarchically. This means, that visualizing component instances of the same type is given by concept.

But how to specify a component visualization concept? The problem is to cope with the multiplicity of relations between the component parts. Being able to visualize a to-many relation r between to elements A and B means that the visualization concept has to cope with any number of B instances aggregated in A.

To implement a generic graphical editor where you can design a component visualization concept which handles the presentation of to-many relation is quite a challenge.

I will try to sketch a possible solution in one of my next blogs.