ODA Ecore Driver Backport

This post is a continuation of the description of the ODA Ecore Enablement plug-ins, now available for download from the Eclipse datatools incubator.
Recently, the ODA Ecore plug-ins were backported for JDK 1.4 and Eclipse 3.2 compatibility. This project has been moved into the datatools incubator attic directory. The same functionality is there in both sets of plug-ins, but there is no guarantee of future support for the archived version.
The primary difference between the Europa version and the backport is the backport's use of the now-deprecated org.eclipse.emf.ocl API for running ocl queries that has since been replaced by a new org.eclipse.ocl query parser. The backport does work in Europa, but the newer, EMF 2.3-dependent version of the plug-in allows shorter, context-free ocl query syntax.

Set up the ODA Ecore Driver in Eclipse 3.2

Download Eclipse 3.2 Callisto and unzip it.
Download EMF 2.2 and unzip it into your Callisto directory.
Download the EMF 2.2 examples and unzip them into your Callisto directory if you want to try the example described in the ODA Ecore Getting Started Guide.
Download EMFT Validation 1.0.1 and unzip it into your Callisto directory.
Download EMFT Transaction 1.0.2 and unzip it into your Callisto directory.
Download EMFT OCL 1.0.1 and unzip it into your Callisto directory.
Download EMFT Query 1.0.1 and unzip it into your Callisto directory.

After starting this installation of Eclipse 3.2, install the following plug-ins from the Callisto discovery site:
Database Development -> Datatools Platform Enablement 0.9 and its dependencies
Charting and Reporting -> Eclipse BIRT Report Designer Framework 2.1 and its dependencies (to run the example described in the ODA Ecore Getting Started Guide).

Import The Archived ODA Ecore Driver projects from CVS.
The Host is dev.eclipse.org
The Repository path is /cvsroot/datatools
Browse to org.eclipse.datatools.incubator/attic, select

• org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.oda.ecore
  
• org.eclipse.datatools.enablement.oda.ecore.ui
  

and check the projects out to your workspace.

Because the plug-ins are JDK 1.4 compatible, if you have a later version of the JDK, you might want to set your Java Compiler Preference to 1.4 Compliance to eliminate any compiler warnings.
Everything should be set-up correctly, and you should now see no compiler errors.

Try the ODA Ecore driver extlibrary Example

We can now launch a new Eclipse runtime and set up an initial BIRT report and .extlibrary file in our workspace as described in the example from the ODA Ecore Getting Started Guide.
Data source creation is the same, so we can follow the instructions without changes.
Data Set creation is slightly different because the query syntax for the backport is more strict. The boolean query in the example, self.oclIsKindOf(Writer), will work for the backport. The differences show up with more complex queries.
Suppose we want to find only references to James Fenimore Cooper. While we can use self.name = 'James Fenimore Cooper' in the latest version of the plug-in, this query will not work in the backport. The query must read self.oclIsKindOf(Writer) and self.oclAsType(Writer).name = 'James Fenimore Cooper'. The newer org.eclipse.ocl query parser can handle the stricter old-style query, but the older org.eclipse.emf.ocl parser cannot properly interpret the shorter context-free query.
Aside from that slight difference in query syntax, the plug-ins currently have the same features. So if you have the restriction that you must continue using Eclipse 3.2 or Java 1.4 and cannot upgrade to Eclipse 3.3 or EMF 2.3, but you need the features exposed by the ODA Ecore driver, you have this backport as an option!