UML CASE tool supporting OLE compound document

Research and development projects, in the past decade, have shown that object-oriented (OO) technology could importantly contribute in productivity and reusability improvement. There are various research areas related to OO technology. Two of major research fields in this area are concerned in issues for CASE tools and component- based technologies. This paper discusses an example of applying component-based technology to a CASE tool. This paper proposes the research experience gained while we have developing OODesigner, an OO CASE tool, with compound document support functionality based on COM/OLE technology. As OODesigner with compound document support has interoperability with other application software of Windows system, it can provide more powerful documentation environment than other CASE tools. OODesigner can be used not only to model UML diagrams, but also to make documentation cooperatively with various kinds of OLE servers and containers. Therefore we can conduct powerful and consistent documentation with the tool. In this paper, we present design issues for incrementally implementing the compound document support facilities as a container and a server and show a brief sample for demonstrating the usability of the OLE enabled CASE tool.