Textual Views in Model Driven Engineering

Building views on abstract models is one of the key concepts of model-driven engineering. Different views help to present concepts behind a model in a way that they can be understood and edited by different stakeholders or developers in different roles. Within graphical modelling several approaches exist allowing the definition of explicit holistic, partial or combined graphical views for models.On the other hand several frameworks that provide textual editing support for models have been presented over recent years. However, the combination of both principals, meaning textual, editable and decorating views is lacking in all of these approaches. In this paper, we introduce a textual decorator approach that allows to separately store and manage the textual concrete syntax from the actual abstract model elements. Thereby we allow to define textual views on models that may be partial and/or overlapping concerning other(graphical and/or textual) views.