Profile Applications in Papyrus Mars M3

This week's M3 milestone of the Mars release of the Eclipse Papyrus project adds new capabilities for profile applications in your UML models. Now, profile applications, and the extensions of your model elements by the stereotypes that they define, can be stored separately from the packages in your models to which they are applied.

The brief (seven-minute) video above demonstrates the most important capabilities of profile applications in Mars M3, including:

• separating a profile application and its accompanying stereotype applications into their own model
• loading and unloading stereotype applications (the models to which they are applied are independent of them)
• opening profile applications in their own editors
• duplicating profile applications

The last item above is particularly interesting, as it shows how the same profile may be applied to the same package multiple times, with different stereotypes applied to elements and/or different values of the attributes of those stereotypes. This is especially useful for comparative "what if" scenarios, such as modeling alternative deployments of software components onto hardware in an embedded system using different applications of the MARTE profile.

Of course, a profile application once externalized into its own resource in this way can also be re-absorbed into the model to which it is applied. This is not demonstrated in the video, being left as an exercise for the reader.

For a detailed history of the development of this feature, see bug 399859. Better yet, install the M3 milestone of Papyrus from the Mars simultaneous release repository and play with it!