Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4 REA DSL Tool Support
Having developed our DSL approach towards REA modeling in theory, we wanted
to evaluate our approach by practical means. Thereby, we focused on three major
steps. Firstly, we evaluated the technical feasibility of the DSL by an implemen-
tation based on Microsoft DSL tool kits. Thereby, we were able to eliminate
technical flaws in the meta model. Secondly, we wanted to test our tool if it
properly supports existing REA models. For this purpose we had 32 REA mod-
els available and successfully completed the reengineering task to represent these
models within our REA DSL. During our reengineering activities the strengths
of our rather strict meta model became evident - we were able to recognize flaws
in the existing REA models which have not been recognized before due to the
complexity in the ontology representation and missing tool support. Thirdly, we
approached the originator of REA - William McCarthy - to seek his advise and
to report inconsistencies in existing REA models. However, so far we have not
yet done any usability studies, nor have we used the tool set in real world case
studies. We will conduct these kinds of evaluations once we extend our approach
to cover the REA policy infrastructure.
We implemented the graphical REA-DSL tool based on
Microsoft's Visual
Studio 2010 Visualization & Modeling SDK (V&M SDK)
. Accordingly we used
the V&M SDK to create the meta models explained before in Section 3. Addi-
tional custom code enables to set further constraints, necessary for the validation
of the REA model. In a second step the designer - see Figure 6 - is created to
support the REA modeling.
B
A
C
D
E
Fig. 6.
REA-designer
The designer is separated into five major areas: The
modeling canvas
(A) the
toolbox
(B), the
solution explorer
(C), the
property window
(D) and the
valida-
tion window
(E). By dragging the modeling elements from the
toolbox
on the
modeling canvas
, a REA model can be assembled in a graphical representation.
The
solution explorer
provides a tree based overview of the elements of the cur-
rently displayed model as well as a file and directory structure to hold different
