Chapter 9 Generating and Reverse Engineering OO Source Files

Reverse Engineering OO Source Files into an OOM

Reverse engineering is the process of extracting data or source code from a file and using it to build or update an OOM. You can reverse engineer objects to a new model, or to an existing model.

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

Java
IDL
PowerBuilder
XML - PowerDesigner uses a parser developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/).
C#
VB
VB.NET

Inner classifiers

When you reverse a language containing one or more inner classifiers (see "Composite and inner classifiers" in the Building Structural Diagrams chapter) into an OOM, one class is created for the outer class, and one class is created for each of the inner classifiers, and an inner link is created between each inner classifier and the outer class.

Symbol creation

If you select the Create Symbols reverse option, the layout of the symbols in the diagram is automatically arranged. When reverse engineering a large number of objects with complex interactions, auto-layout may create synonyms of objects to improve the diagram readability.