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JetBrains MPS Text Generator Plugin

This plugin is an alternative text generator for MPS, using the standard model to model generation mechanisms (node macros, loop macros, property macros, etc.) to generate plain text, as opposed to MPS's programmatical textgens.

This plugin enables copy/pasting an existing piece of text and parameterizing parts of this text using macros.

Quickstart

This plugin allows you to:

  • generate directly to plain text without modeling your generation target language
  • generate to multiple text formats in the same generator run
  • create multiple textgens that obey generator priority rules

The plugin has been developed for MPS 3.3. To install the plugin, install it from the JetBrains plugins repository:

  • in MPS, select File -> Settings -> Plugins -> Browse repositories...
  • search for plaintextgen
  • press Install

After installation, add com.dslfoundry.plaintextgen to the Used Languages of your generator (main@generator model) and create a TextgenText template in your generator. For examples, see the test language in this repository.

Main features

  • Group and layout your content using horizontal, vertical, and indented collections
  • Split plain text into various cells to apply MPS generator macros to them
  • Paste unstructured text from a buffer to MPS. The structure of this text (indentations, new lines, tabs) will be automatically analyzed and converted into a TextgenText structure which you can then parameterize at your convenience.

Advantages of this plugin over the default textgen

In short, this plugin brings MPS -> plaintext connectivity in a pretty usable way to MPS.

  • Text generation can be part of your normal generator chain and can thus have a place in the generator priorities
  • The language looks similar to the MPS editor language, which helps you to structure/layout your text, including indentation
  • Different use cases are accomodated:
  • Pasting in larger amounts of text from the clipboard and parametrizing some of it
  • Making text from scratch and parameterizing some of it

Differences with standard textgen mechanism

The standard textgen approach assumes that you model your target language (e.g. XML, or C in mbeddr) as an MPS language with all its concepts. Concept textgens provide a simple translation from concept to text. This approach is great for language extensibility, but requires that you model concepts of your target language, which in some cases is too large an investment.

This plugin allows you to to write a text template and fill in the gaps using standard macros. For example: You generate from your DSL directly to VHDL, but VHDL has not yet been modeled in MPS.

Additionally, because text is now also an MPS model, all standard generator mechanisms (including reductions and generator priorities) apply. This is not the case for the default textgens, which are only triggered after all model to model transformations are complete. Also, this approach enables you to implement the textgen as a language extension (and therefore define multiple textgens for the same concept).

Build instructions

To run the build, you need ant. The build is run by performing the following command on the command line:

ant -Dmps_home=<your MPS install directory> clean generate assemble