Chapter 11 Managing Transformations

Defining a transformation

In PowerDesigner, a transformation defines a set of actions to be executed during generation or upon request. You define a transformation in the profile category of an extended model definition. Transformations can be defined either on a metaclass or on a selected stereotype or criterion.

You define a transformation when you need:

A utility that modifies objects in a model in order to adapt the model to special needs. For example, you can create a transformation in an OOM that converts <<control>> classes into components
A way to modify an object and be able to undo this modification: you can create one transformation to perform one task and another transformation to undo this task. This feature can be very useful during round-trip engineering. Suppose you generate a PDM from an OOM in order to create O/R mapping. If the source OOM contains components, you can create transformations that convert classes from components in order to easily generate and map tables in a PDM. However, when you update the source OOM from the generated PDM, you can use another transformation that will automatically recreate the components from the classes