Copying EMF models with Henshin

Copying arbitrary EMF models is an easy task using the EMF utils class: a simple EcoreUtil.copy(obj) does the job. This method uses the reflective API of EMF to copy EObjects including their type information and all their features. In Henshin, model transformations are statically typed. Therefore, it is not obvious how to realize such a generic copy functionality that works for any EObject. One way to do it anyway is using the recently introduced wrapper model. The idea is that every EObject is wrapped by a WObject which contains metadata information as normal structural features. This allows us to set and modify the type of a WObject without the need to know its type at design time. In a similar way, we can access and change the types and values of structural features. We can use the wrappers to specify a copy-transformation as follows.

We first create for every WObject another WObject of the same type. We then copy all WValues of the WObjects, and then all the WLinks between the WObject. The wrapper objects automatically reflect these changes in the wrapped EObjects. In this way, we realized a generic copy function in Henshin. Note that the goal was not to implement a better copy method than provided in EcoreUtil (I don't think that's actually possible). We just want to show how dynamic typing in Henshin truely increases the expressiveness and the flexibility of the language. The copy transformation can be found in Henshin's examples plug-in.