Installing stable version

Attention: adding archgenxml egg to a Plone buildout is not supported! Plone 3.x buildout is shipped with old Zope 3.3. ArchGenXML depends on latest version of zope 3 eggs. So please create a buildout only for archgenxml like described below.

If you want to install archgenxml via buildout (recommended), read Using buildout and skip the Using easy_install in a virtualenv part.

It can happen ArchGenXML version on plone.org is older than Pypi because the release manager forgot to upload it on plone.org or for another reason. easy_install and buildout will get by default the latest ArchGenXML version on Pypi, so it's fine.

$ mkdir archgenxml_buildout
$ cd archgenxml_buildout

[buildout]
parts =
    archgenxml

[archgenxml]
recipe = zc.recipe.egg:scripts
eggs = archgenxml

$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

$ ./bin/buildout

$ easy_install virtualenv

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages agx
$ cd agx/
$ source bin/activate
$ easy_install archgenxml

$ easy_install -U archgenxml
$ easy_install -U xmiparser

Installing development version

ArchGenXML's svn trunk is for the 2.x development version.

As usual, the goal is to keep trunk workable. Some of the developers work and develop on the edge: trunk.

If you need stability, use the latest release.

The only supported way to use ArchGenXML trunk is with buildout. You install it like this:

$ svn co https://svn.plone.org/svn/archetypes/ArchGenXML/buildout archgenxml_buildout
$ cd archgenxml_buildout
$ python bootstrap.py
$ bin/buildout

To update your buildout:

$ cd archgenxml_buildout
$ svn up
$ bin/buildout

If you are intersted in AGX 3 development, see http://dev.plone.org/archetypes/browser/AGX

I call below <path to archgenxml> the archgenxml_buildout directory.

Get the ArchGenXML profile

The archgenxml_profile.xmi file contains information about stereotypes, fields, and other stuff that AGX needs to generate valid Python code from your model. You can get the profile from subversion.

Or you can regenerate it with <path to archgenxml>/bin/agx_argouml_profile. A archgenxml_profile.xmi file is generated in the current directory.

Create a "<path to archgenxml>/profiles" directory and put the file here.

Note: In an older version of AGX, this file was called 'argouml_profile.xmi'. You should not use it with ArgoUML > 0.24.

Troubleshooting

On Windows, you may have to install and configure the mingw32 compiler to compile the zope.proxy egg, an indirect dependency of archgenxml. Now zope.proxy eggs are built for Windows, so you should not have this problem anymore.

Support

For any questions or problems, please ask on the archetypes-users mailing-list. Please don't use comments on the manual pages. Not everybody is alerted when a comment is added.

If you want to contribute to this documentation, please post on the plone-docs mailing-list.

Background and Notes

The screenshot below shows ArgoUML with the custom tags from the definition file. Having many of the possible options available from a menu has the following benefits:

• saves time - sometimes clicking is faster than typing
• reduces errors - no more mispelled tags
• presents a learning opportunity - seeing new tags and stereotypes provides a springboard for further investigation

ArgoUML with ArchGenXML profile

This walks you through how a setup of ArgoUML on an Ubuntu desktop system. The methodology should be easily adjusted to other platforms.

Assumptions

These are my assumptions:

• You already have latest sun java JRE installed. You can get it on Ubuntu with:

  apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
  

  If:

  update-alternatives --list java
  

  don't give you /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java, you can set java sun as the default java implementation like this:

  update-alternatives --set java /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
  

• You have copied archgenxml_profile.xmi in the <path to archgenxml>/profiles directory like described in the previous section.

Install ArgoUML

Go to http://argouml.tigris.org and download the latest stable version of ArgoUML (0.28 when these lines are written). Download the exe for Windows, the tar.gz archive for Linux.

On Windows, execute the downloaded exe to install it.

On Linux, unpack the archive somewhere, a good location is '/opt':

$ sudo mkdir /opt
$ cd /opt
$ sudo tar xvf /tmp/ArgoUML-0.28.tar.gz

It should create a argouml-0.28 directory.

It is handy to symlink 'argouml.sh' to '/usr/local/bin/argouml':

$ sudo ln -s /opt/argouml-0.28/argouml.sh /usr/local/bin/argouml

Configure ArgoUML to use the definition file

Note: ArgoUML 0.24 used to use the argo.defaultModel option to specify a profile to use like this:

java -Dargo.defaultModel=<path to archgenxml>/profiles/archgenxml_profile.xmi -jar /opt/ArgoUML/argouml.jar

It's not the case anymore with latest ArgoUML version. Please read on.

• Launch ArgoUML and go to Edit -> Settings... -> Profiles

• Click on Add and specify your <path to archgenxml>/profiles directory.

  Note: archgenxml will use the list of profiles directories configured on ArgoUML.

• Close ArgoUML and launch it again.

• Go again in Edit -> Settings... -> Profiles AGXProfile should be visible now in "Available Profiles".

• Click on ">>" to add it to "Default profiles".

• You should remove the Java profile from the "Default profiles" list to be sure to not use stereotypes and tag definitions from this one. You should only have AGXProfile and UML 1.4 in this list. You can't remove the UML 1.4 here, but you remove it by project.

The global configuration is now done.

Now for every new project you create:

• Click on the fourth icon in the toolbar to configure Profiles for this project. Delete UML 1.4. You should really only have AGXProfile is this list.

Note: if you want to generate Plone 2.5 compatible code, set on the model root the plone_target_version tag definition with value 2.5.

Why ArgoUML?

Just a few notes on why using ArgoUML.

• Mature - it supports the important stuff (at least as far as ArchGenXML goes), state diagrams, tagged-values, stereotypes.
• It is pretty lightweight, which is important when your laptop only has 256 MB of RAM and a PIII 700 Mhz processor. Poseidon Community Edition, though nice, is just too memory hungry.
• Price is good (free and open source)