Graphical Cross-Reference Browser for the OMDev Environment

Abstract: With todays software development we see huge structures of objects and relationships beingbuilt up. How these are constructed and designed is important to how we make robust andflexible architectures. Developers have to constantly have this overview in mind whenworking with the whole system to prepare for potential changes later on. One object may bereplaced by another one or removed completely; this is when the relationship going to andfrom them comes into picture. Many decisions on what to change or what to remove from thisstructure needs some way of proving that this wont have any side-effects on anything else. Adeveloper could make such a decision by scanning through all files and build a mindset of allthe dependencies between the objects to make sure that something like this would be okay.This report evaluates the possibilities of making a tool that can ease this task in order togain a better overview of all the dependencies going through the system. By observingprojects that are built for other similar tasks and how they haven chosen their implementationwe can build a tool that will inspect the objects specifically to Modelica code. This report alsodiscuss how we can elaborate on the number of features in order to gain more interactivityand make a more user-friendly experience to the end users.The results of our implementation will show a fully functional and optimized productinside the software Eclipse. This product provides all required information by extending uponexisting functionalities of Modelica to get the perspective and access to data that we need fora complete analyze. This report will also show how we effectively make use of graphicallibraries to provide interactivity, bonds, layout orderings and translation from data to visualsobjects. All of these together are ingredients to a tool in which a user can gain a fast responseand move around quickly in his model-structure. In the end we can see that our implementation can reference most things related todependencies in an object-oriented language and explain to the user how these relationshipsplay into our object-structure or where their sources are and where they are pointing.