Heiko Behrens (Blog)

The Generation Gap Pattern is a common way to weave manually written code into generated software artifacts. While this pattern describes how to structure your classes logically it does not teach you where to place these classes physically as files into the filesystem.

Figure 1: The Generation Gap Pattern

Separating generated files from manually written code is best practice for many reasons. It enables you to use version control wisely and makes the distinction between generated and manually written code easy. The Eclipse EMF Modeling Workflow Engine together with M2T Xpand allows you to accomplish this goal in different ways.

In this post, I will present three different approaches that share some common ideas. Each strategy uses a dedicated directory for generated class files whereas manually written subclasses are stored for themselves in a different directory.

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