Wizards in Acceleo 3.1
A small blog post to show the work in progress on the new Acceleo wizards. You can see in the following picture the current wizard to create a new module in Acceleo 3.0.
For Acceleo 3.1, the wizards will be re-created almost from scratch with three goals in mind:
- give access to the same features in the same amount of “clicks”
- give access easily to small new features
- make the wizard easier to understand for newcomers
As such, I’ve decided to separate the wizard in three part. In the first part, you will define the properties of the module with its location, its name and the metamodels used. You can see in the previous screenshot, that you can use several metamodels with Acceleo. You can already use several metamodels with Acceleo 3.0 but since it does not appear in the wizard, it may not be known by some of our users.
In a second part, you will define some of the properties of the first module element. You have to select its name, the name of the module will be used as default just like in Acceleo 3.0, you can then chose the kind of module element wanted (a template or a query), you have a new option to generate the documentation just like in the wizard of the JDT and finally you have some options available only for templates like the generation of a file or the possibility to use the template as a main template (ie: the entry point of the generation).
In the last part of the wizard, you have access to the initialization options. Thanks to these options, already accessible in Acceleo 3.0, you can initialize your generator with a Java service or with the content of an existing file for example.
To conclude, I would like to attract your attention on the help icons that contain tooltips for all the features in this new wizard. The work that you can see here is still in progress and it may be modified heavily until the final release of Acceleo 3.1 but I’m confident that this new organization of the wizard with more features and yet the same feeling as the old wizard will be easier to use for newcomers and advanced users.
