Creating capabilities to show or hide transformations

You can create capabilities to which you can bind transformations. You should create capabilities in a different plug-in from the transformations that you create. You can bind more than one transformation to a capability. By using this feature, you can show or hide the transformations in the list of available transformations in the New Transformation Configuration wizard or on transformation pop-up menus.

Before you begin

You must know the plug-in name and the transformation ID of the transformation that you are binding to the capability.

About this task

In addition to creating capabilities, you can create new capability categories, which are groupings of capabilities. For example, you might create a capability category that contains a capability for each model-to-model transformation that you write.

You can also create capabilities for the language-specific transformations in IBM® DevOps Model Architect.

Procedure

Create a plug-in project.

In the navigation view, double-click the plug-in manifest file and, in the plug-in manifest editor, on the Extensions page, add an extension point named org.eclipse.ui.activities that defines the items in the following table:

Item	Description
Name and description of the capability	Specify this information in the `<activity>` element.
Name and description of the capability category	Specify this information in the `<category>` element. You can create multiple capability categories.
Relationship between each capability and the capability category	Specify this information in the `<categoryActivityBinding>` element.
Pattern or transformation that is associated with a capability	Specify this information in the `<activityPatternBinding>` element. You can bind a transformation to multiple capabilities. The `pattern` attribute must specify the transformation plug-in name and identifier in the following format: `x`/`y`, where `x` represents the transformation plug-in name and `y` represents the transformation identifier. You can bind multiple transformations to a capability by specifying a regular expression in the `pattern` attribute, as in this example: `com.myCompany.myPlugin/com.myCompany.*`

Click File > Save.
Compile the plug-in.
Test the plug-in. For example, you might test the plug-in in a separate instance of an Eclipse workbench.
Deploy the plug-in.

Results

The new capability category and its capabilities are displayed in the Capabilities pane the next time that you click Window > Preferences.

Example

The following example creates a capability category called "My transformations," two capabilities, and a binding between the transformations and the appropriate capability. In this example, you create a capability for a custom UML-to-Java transformation and a capability for a group of model-to-model transformations.

<extension point="org.eclipse.ui.activities">
      <activity description="This capability references the transformation called MyUMLToJavaTransformation." id="myCapability.activity1" name="My UML-to-Java transformation">
      </activity>
      <activity description="This capability references my model-to-model transformations." id="myCapability.activity2" name="My model-to-model transformations">
      </activity>
      <category id="myCapability.category1" description="My transformations" name="My transformations">
      </category>
      <categoryActivityBinding activityId="myCapability.activity1" categoryId="myCapability.category1">
      </categoryActivityBinding>
      <categoryActivityBinding activityId="myCapability.activity2" categoryId="myCapability.category1">
      </categoryActivityBinding>
      <activityPatternBinding activityId="myCapability.activity1" pattern="com\.myCompany\.myPlugin/com\.myCompany\.myTransformation\.MyUMLToJavaTransformationIdentifier">
      </activityPatternBinding>
      <activityPatternBinding activityId="myCapability.activity2" pattern="com\.myCompany\.myPlugin/com\.myCompany\.myTransformation\.modeltomodel.*">
      </activityPatternBinding>
</extension>

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