EMF Forms 1.9.0 Feature: Ecore Editor Reloaded ... again

With Neon, we released EMF Forms 1.9.0. EMF Forms makes it really simple to create forms which edit your data based on an EMF model. To get started with EMF Forms please refer to our tutorial. In this post, we wish to outline one major highlight of release 1.9.0: a new version of the Ecore editor and a generic editor based on EMF Forms.

If you are following this blog, you might think this sounds familiar. We have actually already introduced the new editor framework in version 1.8.0. Please see this post for the initial introduction of the feature. However, with 1.9.0, we have improved those editors based on the feedback from several adopters. Therefore, we have now included the EMF Forms editors in our standard SDK, which makes them available in the Eclipse Neon Modeling Edition. So, if you use Neon, you can just right click any Ecore and select the “Ecore Editor” to use the new version.

We provide an alternative version of the good-old Ecore editor, the Genmodel editor and, probably most exciting: A generic editor, which can be used as a basis to implement tooling for your custom model. It is basically a replacement of the well-known “generated editor”, but it provides much more. Without any code generation you get a fully featured editor for you custom model, which can be customized using the full power of the EMF Forms view modeling approach.

This EMF Forms editor is fully generic. Therefore no code generation is required. You only need to register the editor to the custom file extension for which you wish to use the editor. The following listing shows the registration for EMF model instances with a file ending “.task”. Please have a look at this tutorial to learn more about this.

org.eclipse.emfforms.spi.editor.GenericEditor" default=“true” extensions=“task” icon=“pathToYourIcon” id=“yourID” name=“Your Editor Name”/>

Please provide feedback by submitting bugs or feature requests or contact us if you are interested in enhancements or support.