Creating EMF Model instances programmatically

Goal: You have an EMF Ecore meta-model and now you want to create model instances programmatically and save them into files.

We illustrate this using the SISSy GAST Model.

You need the following imports:

  import org.eclipse.emf.ecore.resource.Resource;
  import org.eclipse.emf.ecore.resource.ResourceSet;
  import org.eclipse.emf.ecore.resource.impl.ResourceSetImpl;

Here we import Root class and its factory (adapt this to import your own Root class and factory!):

  import de.fzi.gast.core.Root;
  import de.fzi.gast.core.coreFactory;	

The following method describes the steps for setting up of ResourceSet, Resource, Root, etc.:

  public void setupAndSaveEMFInstanceResource() {
     ResourceSet rs = new ResourceSetImpl();
     // Here the resource is created, with fileextensions "gast" and "xml" (adapt this to use your own file extension).
     Resource gastResource = createAndAddResource("C:/file.gast", new String[] {"gast", "xml"}, rs);
     // The root object is created by using (adapt this to create your own root object)
     Root root = coreFactory.eINSTANCE.createRoot();  
     gastResource.getContents().add(root);
     saveResource(gastResource);
  }

The following two methods can be used as helper methods for resource creation and resource saving.

  public static Resource createAndAddResource(String outputFile, String[] fileextensions, ResourceSet rs) {
     for (String fileext : fileextensions) {
        rs.getResourceFactoryRegistry().getExtensionToFactoryMap().put(fileext, new XMLResourceFactoryImpl());
     }		
     URI uri = URI.createFileURI(outputFile);
     Resource resource = rs.createResource(uri);
     ((ResourceImpl)resource).setIntrinsicIDToEObjectMap(new HashMap());
     return resource;
  }

  public static void saveResource(Resource resource) {
     Map saveOptions = ((XMLResource)resource).getDefaultSaveOptions();
     saveOptions.put(XMLResource.OPTION_CONFIGURATION_CACHE, Boolean.TRUE);
     saveOptions.put(XMLResource.OPTION_USE_CACHED_LOOKUP_TABLE, new ArrayList());
     try {
        resource.save(saveOptions);
     } catch (IOException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
     }
  }