2. Cheddar Project File (XML and AADL)

Information stored during a simulation can be saved into project files. A project file is a XML file defined by this DTD. By the way, you do not need a deep understanding of the layout of cheddar project files except if you want to edit project files by hand. If so, you should check if your project files are correctly structured by the tool xml2xml (xml2xml just reads, parses and displays the content of a XML Cheddar project file on the screen ).

All Cheddar XML files can be displayed with an Internet Browser if you put the following XSLT file and the following CSS file in the directory hosting your XML Cheddar files. To do so, you should use a recent release of Internet Explorer (version 6.0 or later), Netscape (version 7.0 or later) or Mozilla (version 1.0 or later).

From Cheddar, there are two ways to load a project file :

  • First, a project file can be loaded from the File/Open XML project submenu. Just click on the Open button, and give the file name of your project.
  • Second, a project can be loaded from the command line. For instance, to start Cheddar and load the project file my_project.xml, just run Cheddar with my_project.xml as the first argument :
    $cheddar my_project.xml

Saving a project can be done with the same "File" menu.

Cheddar can also import AADL specification [SAE 04]. This service can be accessed through the submenu "File/AADL/Import AADL". In the same way, an XML project can be exported towards an AADL specification (see the "File/AADL/Export AADL" sub-menu).

WARNING : the AADL parser included in Cheddar is only compliant with AADL V1 models. It is clearly deprecated and only kept for legacy reasons. If you plan to use Cheddar with AADL, please see AADLInspector or the Cheddar OSATE 2 plugin.

As with XML files, you can launch Cheddar with an AADL file given from the command line. To launch Cheddar and automatically read the foo.aadl AADL specification file, do:

$cheddar -a foo.aadl

Finally, XML or AADL files can be loaded from any directory and a project can be saved in several project files. For example, to load a project saved in two AADL files called bar1.aadl and bar2.aadl, which are stored in the directory /home/foo, you must use the following command-line:

$cheddar -I/home/foo -a bar1.aadl bar2.aadl

By default, Cheddar automatically loads the standards AADL files AADL_Project.aadl, AADL_Properties.aadl, Cheddar_Properties.aadl and User_Defined_Cheddar_Properties.aadl. The -I option can also be used to give the directory storing these standard AADL files. Otherwise, these files ares supposed to be in the current directory. A copy of them can be generated from the File/AADL/Export property sets used by Cheddar and File/AADL/Export standard AADL property set submenus.