Chapter 10 Reverse Engineering in an OOM

What is reverse engineering?

Reverse engineering is the process of examining and recovering data or source code from a file that is then used to build or update an OOM.

You can reverse engineer objects to a new model, or to an existing model. When you reverse engineer an object which already exists in a model, you use an object comparison box to choose either to replace the existing object, or to keep the existing object in the model.

Parsing
PowerDesigner uses a parser software for XML reverse engineering, developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).

You can reverse the following types of files into an OOM:

Java
IDL
PowerBuilder
XML
J2EE components

Object Language reverse engineering

If you use reverse engineering into an OOM, you can easily access the reverse engineering options of an object language that is not the current object language. This functionality is accessible from File→Reverse Engineer→Object Language.

Inner classifiers

When you reverse a language containing one or more inner classifiers into an OOM, one class is created for the outer class, and one class is created for each of the inner classifiers. Moreover, an inner link is created between each inner classifier and the outer class to which it belongs. Inner classifiers are commonly used in object oriented languages.

For more information on inner classifiers, see the "Defining inner classifiers" section, in the Building Structural Diagrams chapter.

Symbol creation

If you select the Create Symbols reverse option, the layout of the symbols in the diagram is automatically arranged. In case of a reverse engineering with a large number of objects with complex interactions, the auto-layout feature is likely to create synonyms of objects to improve the diagram readability. For example, if a class has a large number of associations, the auto-layout feature will create a synonym of this class in another location of the diagram in order to improve the diagram presentation.