Getting started

Assuming you already installed all the required softwares as described in the Requirements Section, you can the proceed by downloading and using the DICER tool. Along this path, you can just download the dicer-full.zip artifact from one the available release (Figure 1).

Once the download completes, within Eclipse you can create a new general Eclipse project (Figure 2) and import the downloaded dicer-full.zip archive (Figure 3).

You should end up with the following (Figure 4) project structure:

At this step you can start creating a new DICER model using the Reflective Ecore Model Diagram Editor plugin's feature (Figure 5). Following the wizard, when you are asked to select the input Ecore metamodel, you should browse your workspace and point to the metamodels/ddsm.ecore file (Figure 6). Finally you are asked to select the root class for your model; you have to choose the DDSM Eclass (Figure 7).

Finally you are redirected to the graphical modeling editor, where you can start drawing your model using the provided palette and validating it with the OCL validator (Figure 8).

Once the modeling activity is finalized, you can simply run the DICER provided .jar artifact (from Eclipse or from the command line), in order to obtain the resulting TOSCA blueprint to be then used as input for the Deployment Service.

In order to run DICER, assuming that you already created a DDSM model using the provided metamodel and with the help of the Ecore Reflective Diagram Editor, you just need to run the compiler .jar artifact giving as input the path to the input DDSM model and the path to the output TOSCA models. Make sure the dicer-core-0.1.0.jar is in the same directory of the transformation/ and metamodels/ folders (if you downloaded the dicer-full.zip artifact this structure is already in place). In order to run DICER you can execute following command:

java -jar dicer-core-0.1.0.jar -inModel models/default.xmi -outModel models/default_tosca

Make sure that the -outModel argument is a path to a file with no extention. DICER will create also an xmi and a json version of the generated deployment blueprint.