User-defined Signatures for Source Incremental Model-to-text Transformation

Model-to-text (M2T) transformation is an important part of model driven engineering, as it is used to generate a variety of textual artefacts from models, such as build scripts, configuration files, documentation and code. Despite the importance of M2T transformation, building M2T transformations that scale with the size of the input model(s) remains challenging because most contemporary M2T transformation languages do not provide adequate support for incremental transformations. We have previously proposed the use of automatic signatures, as a technique for source incremental transformations. In this paper, we introduce user-defined signatures, which outperform automatic signatures. We perform a comparative analysis of user-defined signatures with automatic signatures, and non-incremental transformation by application to an existing M2T transformation.