Implementing efficient model validation in EMF tools

Model-driven development tools built on industry standard platforms, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF), heavily use model queries in various use cases, such as model transformation, well-formedness constraint validation and domain-specific model execution. As these queries are executed rather frequently in interactive modeling applications, they have a significant impact on the runtime performance of the tool, and also on the end user experience. However, due to their complexity, they can be time consuming to implement and optimize on a case-by-case basis. To address these shortcomings, we developed the EMF-INCQUERY framework for defining declarative queries over EMF models and executing them effectively using a caching mechanism. In the current paper, we demonstrate how our framework can be easily integrated with other EMF tools. We describe a case study in which EMF-INCQUERY is integrated into the open source Papyrus UML environment to provide on-the-fly validation of well-formedness criteria in UML models.