In IBM® Rational® Rhapsody® you
can visualize frozen legacy code or edit external code as external
elements.
This external code is code that is developed and
maintained outside of Rational Rhapsody.
This code will not be regenerated by Rational Rhapsody,
but will participate in code generation of Rational Rhapsody models
that interact or interface with this external code so, for example,
the appropriate #include statement is generated.
This functionality provides easy modeling with code written outside
of Rational Rhapsody,
and a better understanding of a proven system.
Rational Rhapsody supports
the following functionality for external elements:
- Reverse engineering can import elements as external.
- Reverse engineering populates the model with enough
information to:
- Model external elements in the model.
- Enable you to open the source of the external elements,
even if the element is not included in the scope of the active component.
- Rational Rhapsody generates
the correct #include for references to external elements.
- Elements inherit their externality from the parent.
For example, if a package is external, all its aggregates are also
external.
- You can add external elements to component files
to define the exact location of the source code.
- Rational Rhapsody displays
external elements in the scope tree of the component.
There are two ways to create external elements:
- By reverse engineering the files
- By modeling