The ProR adapter identifies traceable artifacts based on requirements that are stored in the ReqIF (Requirements Interchange Format) file format. More precisely, the adapter creates artifacts for ReqIF specification objects that fulfill certain conditions. These conditions are configurable. The adapter propagates the selection of artifacts from ANALYZE to the ProR requirements engineering platform and vice versa.
ProR is the graphical component of the open-source RMF (Requirements Modeling Framework) software framework. It allows for creating and editing ReqIF models. Requirements in these models are defined as „specification objects”, each of which has a user-defined type and a user-defined set of attributes. Based on these types and attributes, the ProR adapter supports filtering of those specification objects that should be recognized as traceable artifacts.
ProR displays specification objects and their attributes in tables. It also displays specification objects in Eclipse’s Overview view. The ProR adapter recognizes selections both in tables and in the overview.
Open the ANALYZE configuration with the ANALYZE configuration editor, and add a new data access as described in section "Data accesses". Select Eclipse ProR as data access type.
Supported options:
Example:
resource *.reqif
This configuration rule specifies that ANALYZE should load ReqIF models from all files in the workspace whose filename extension is .reqif.
The ProR artifact type identifies specification objects in ReqIF models as traceable artifacts. The set of identified artifacts can be constrained, based on their types and the values of their attributes. These constraints can be configured.
For each combination of constraints to derive artifacts for, you can define how the artifact name and the values of custom attributes should be computed. In both cases, you can specify expressions that refer to the attributes of the specification objects that were identified as artifacts.
Open the ANALYZE configuration with the ANALYZE configuration editor, and add a new artifact type as described in section "Artifact types". Select your previously-configured Eclipse ProR data access in the Data access drop-down list.
We will now introduce the configuration language, including its syntax, by an example. You can find the complete list of keywords below.
Let’s consider a specification Functional Requirements that contains specification objects, some of which have the type Functional Requirement. This type defines the attributes ID, Title, Description and Status.
To identify artifacts, we need to create a mapping and configure it. The following mapping configuration for a ProR artifact type derives artifacts for specification objects of type Functional Requirement and assigns values to their custom attributes. These values depend on conditions on the artifacts themselves. The configuration will be explained in more detail below.
name valueOf(ID) + "-" + valueOf(Title)
map to type "Functional Requirement" if (valueOf("Status") != "REJECTED" and isSet("Status")=="true") {
Description to valueOf(Description)
Status to valueOf("Status")
SpecificationDescription to Specification.valueOf("Description")
}
map to type "Functional Requirement" if (isNotSet("Status")== "true") {
Description to valueOf(Description)
Status to "(unknown)"
SpecificationDescription to Specification.valueOf("Description")
}
Let us assume that we want to identify artifacts for any specification objects of type
Functional Requirement. We can express this by writing
map to type "Functional Requirement". If we additionally want to restrict these functional requirements to those that don’t have the status „REJECTED”, we can do this by adding the condition
if (valueOf("Status") != "REJECTED"). By adding
and isSet("Status")==true to the
if condition, we can exclude those requirements that have no known status. Combining these three conditions, we get the second line of the example above.
In general, the keyword map introduces a set of conditions for specification objects. If a specification object fulfills these conditions, it will be identified as an artifact. The to type keyword simply excludes all specification objects that don’t have the type with the indicated name. The if keyword opens a boolean expression that must evaluate to true for a given specification object to fulfill the constraint. Via valueOf, we can access the value of a specification object’s attribute, like Status in the above example. The keyword isSet allows us to check whether a given attribute has any value at all.
Now we want the artifacts identified for functional requirements to have names that consist of the respective requirement’s ID and its title. We can define this by adding
name valueOf(ID) + "-" + valueOf(Title) to the top of the configuration. Here, a minus character is used to separate ID and title.
If we want to assign attribute values of functional requirements to custom attributes of the corresponding artifacts, we can do this in a separate block of statements, included between curly braces (
{,
}) and appended to the
map statement.
Let’s say we want to assign the values of the
Description and
Status attributes to custom attributes of the same name. We can do this by using the statements
Description to valueOf(Description) and
Status to valueOf("Status").
In ReqIF,
specifications can be used to structure specification objects hierarchically. Like specification objects, specifications have their own sets of attributes. We can access these attributes by using the command
Specification.valueOf instead of
valueOf. Please note that this always refers to the specification of the specification object that
valueOf refers to. We now want to assign the
Description attribute of this specification to the variable
SpecificationDescription. We can do this using the expression
SpecificationDescription to Specification.valueOf("Description").
In conclusion, these variable assignments make up the following block, which completes the first map statement in the example above:
{
Description to valueOf("Description")
Status to valueOf("Status")
SpecificationDescription to Specification.valueOf("Description")
}
Now we also want to consider functional requirements that have an undefined status. We could include them by removing the condition
isSet("Status")==true. However, here we also want to assign a special value to the custom attribute
Status. Usually we would get an empty string for the undefined value, but instead we want the string to be „(unknown)”. We can do this by adding a second
map statement with the condition
isNotSet("Status")== true. The keyword
isNotSet is true whenever an attribute is not set, i.e.,
isNotSet is the opposite of
isSet. We will now identify an artifact for a specification object if it fulfills the conditions of either of the two
map statements. However, we assign different attribute values depending on which one matches.
The ProR artifact type configuration supports the following keywords:
to
expression, where
attribute is the custom attribute’s name and
expression defines how the assigned value is computed.
The keywords isNotSet, isSet, Specification.valueOf and valueOf refer to the „current” specification object. In case of the if expression, this is the specification object that is currently being checked for whether it should be identified as an artifact or not. Otherwise (attribute assignment, name expression) the „current” specification object is one that has already been qualified as a traceable artifact.
The configuration may include one or several map statements – or none at all. If no map statement is specified, all specification objects will be identified as artifacts. The same is true if one of the map statements has no constraints. In case of several map statements, an artifact will be created for a given specification object if it fulfills the constraints of any statement.
An artifact’s version is used for suspicious links validation. The version of an artifact of this type is evaluated as a JSON-like concatenation of all artifact custom attribute values.