Towards Concrete Syntax Based Find for Graphical Domain Specific Languages

One of the main reasons why Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) technologies including Domain-specific modelling languages (DSML) have not reached the expected acceptance in the industry is a poor tool support. One of the features with a limited support even in commercial modelling tools is search (find). Typically, MDE tools support only a simple keyword-based textual search functionality. The same is true for the tools built using Domain-specific language (DSL) tool definition frameworks. It is proposed to provide the concrete syntax-based find functionality as a service of a DSL tool definition framework. The find diagrams are defined in a concrete syntax of a DSL. A definition of a DSL is used to provide a language-specific find functionality in the DSL tool.