GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 95548
XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) support.
Last modified: 2019-03-20 11:01:47 UTC
import || export support for XMI XMI stands for XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) http://xml.coverpages.org/xmi.html OMG (Object Management Group) http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/xmi.htm mentioned on the mailing list several times, surprised no one actually filed a feature request for it before. Other UML editors such as ArgoUML use the XMI file format. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2001-July/msg00087.html "DIA can read and write XMI, it becomes compatible with all other CASE tools" I think full SVG support is more important than XMI, but for people who want to use Dia just for UML it would be very important. Might actually be something businesses would pay to have added.
changed subject, old subject was hard to distinguish XMI from XML
These guys have an XMI engine, potential code reuse http://dachshund.sourceforge.net/index.shtml
User asking about XMI. link to thread in mailing list archive: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/dia-list/2003-April/msg00176.html Lars suggests that using the XSLT plugin might be a good way to do this.
I've been using dia 0.96.1-5ubuntu2 on Ubuntu 8.04 for a couple of days now, to doodle on some OMT models. And I've found it easy to work with, compared to UML editors I've tried. This is probably because the emphasis have been on getting up the class structure, rather than filling up forms just to get a single class into the diagram. I find it easier to get the structure up first, and then flesh out the classes. Anyway, using dia was fine as long as I only wanted the UML diagrams, but when I wanted the diagrams as XMI, not for code generation, but for use in other UML tools, there was no way to export it. Which was really strange, considering all the other export filters available... And google didn't find me much of use, except some dia mailing list discussions from 2004, and a mention for the roadmap early this year. Adding XMI export (and ideally also import), would seriously increase the usefulness of using dia together with other UML modellers, so I suggest this item should be prioritized.
The best way to increase priority is providing something that works. Given the examples of exporters written in Python this should be only as difficult as the XMI specification is. Dia is a volunteers effort: patches accepted.
This interests me. I going to look into it.
The challenge is that tools such as ArgoUML, Poseidon, etc. force a rigorous and precise model yes requiring tedious user interactions but in the end a model that is valid UML and can be encoded in XMI. Dia places no constraints on how users can use the shapes available. For instance you can connect an actor to a node with an aggregation - makes no sense in UML land but perfectly legal as far as Dia is concerned. In order to successfully export to XMI, dia would need to enforce UML standard in the UI to ensure valid UML. And the UI would end up at least as clunky as Poseidon et al. which is exactly what Dia doesn't want to be. While it would be great to be able to export to XMI from Dia, it seems more reasonable to use Dia as your drawing-on-a-napkin tool and a more rigorous UML modeling tool such as Poseidon, ArgoUML, etc. for further development of the model.
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