A Profile Approach to Using UML Models for Rich Form Generation

The Model Driven Development (MDD) has provided a new way of engineering today's rapidly changing requirements into the implementation. However, the development of user interface (UI) part of an application has not benefit much from MDD although today's UIs are complex software components and they play an essential role in the usability of an application. As one of the most common UI examples, consider view forms that are used for collecting data from the user. View forms are usually generated with a lot of manual efforts after the implementation. For example, in case of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (Java EE) web applications, developers create all view forms manually by referring to entity beans to determine the content of forms, but such manual creation is pretty tedious and certainly very much error-prone and makes the system maintenance difficult. One promise in MDD is that we can generate code from UML models. Existing design models in MDD, however, cannot provide all class attributes that are required to generate the practical code of UI fragments. In this paper, we propose a UML profile for view form generation as an extension of the object relational mapping (ORM) profile. A profile form of hibernate validator is also introduced to implement the practical view form generation that includes an user input validation.