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Abstract - This paper describes a new Document Type Definition (DTD) to represent UML activity diagram in XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) format. DTDs are important as far as automatic code generation is concerned. Our proposed DTD considers the activity diagram as a graph. The elements in the activity diagram are nodes and edges. The old versions (1.x) of the UML DTDs describe the activity diagram as a special type of state machine. The proposed DTD is based on UML 2.0, where the activity diagram semantics is rooted in Petri Nets rather than state machines. The proposed DTD defines the tags for different types (action, decision, initial, final etc.) of nodes in the activity diagram and the attributes required for the edges. Each node and edge in the activity diagram can be mapped to the respective XMI tags using this DTD. This can be done in sequential manner. The paper also describes how this DTD is used in the conversion of activity diagram to XMI format, and an algorithm for the conversion process.
Index Terms - UML activity diagram, DTD, XMI, XML, automatic code generation
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I. INTRODUCTION
UML activity diagrams are very important to present the business process and workflow [1]. A programmer can implement it by writing suitable code in a programming language. Anyhow, to draw an activity diagram and to get its full implementation code on a button click is really amazing. This sounds like an easy task, but, indeed, it needs lots of work underneath.
Converting activity diagram to platform neutral representation is a very important step in the automatic code generation. This representation should be widely accepted. The most widely accepted platform independent representation is XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) [5]. Platform independent representation provides portability which allows activity diagram to be exchanged between different modeling tools [3]. This gives developers the freedom to use the modeling tools convenient for their work. This flexibility can be achieved when the diagrams are converted to XMI which is a platform independent format.
XMI is an application of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which is an HTML. We can define XML according to the UML notations [2]. These definitions can be written as Document Type Definition (DTD) file. Each element...