A Novel Approach to Integration of Manual Changes in Generated Code: SeamlessMDD

Model-driven development (MDD) significantly improves web development by generating source code from models at higher abstraction levels, which enhances productivity and enables shorter, less expensive development cycles. However, not all aspects of a web application can be captured in a model, necessitating manual changes to the generated code. To prevent the loss of manual changes due to subsequent code generation, various strategies are recommended in the literature: keeping handwritten and generated code in separate files, utilizing protected regions, or employing a version control system (VCS) to merge handwritten and generated code. Unfortunately, these approaches can introduce complexity into web application architecture and impose an additional burden on developers. This paper presents SeamlessMDD, our novel open-source framework for seamless integration that allows us to maintain handwritten and generated code intertwined without the need to adjust the web application architecture or established workflows. The framework provides the following features: (1) incremental and iterative transformations derived from model versions comparison ensuring that only code for affected model elements is generated or modified; (2) integration of generated and handwritten code using API-based code generators (ABG) that operate on the syntax trees of target programming languages; (3) case-specific support for change propagation and conflict resolution, as opposed to VCS-based systems that operate on a single line. The proposed features were tested in practice within a complex industrial MDD tool.