ISE Assembly Manager Guided Tour

This document takes you through a typical session with the Assembly Manager.

Starting the Assembly Manager

You may launch the Assembly Manager from EiffelStudio either through the corresponding toolbar button or through the Tools menu.

The first screen displayed by the Assembly Manager is the Imported Assembly Viewer. This screen lists all the assemblies currently in the Eiffel Assembly Cache.

Importing signed assemblies into the Eiffel Assembly Cache

To import an assembly into the Eiffel Assembly Cache, you first have to open the Import Tool by clicking on the corresponding toolbar button

or selecting the menu item Import Tool in the Tools menu.

Note: Only signed assemblies may be imported in the Eiffel Assembly Cache.

To import an assembly from the Global Assembly Cache:

Click on the name of the shared assembly you want to import (in the table listing all the shared assemblies)
Click on the corresponding toolbar button or select the item Import from the Tools menu.

The Open Assembly Dialog appears. You can choose the path where the files corresponding to the types in the imported assemblies will be generated. You may also specify whether the Assembly Manager should generate Eiffel friendly names for methods on these types. If this box is left checked then method names such as CopyTo will be generated as copy_to.

To import a signed assembly which is in not in the Global Assembly Cache:

Click on the open toolbar button or select the item Open Assembly in the File menu. The Open Assembly Dialog appears. Select the signed assembly you want to import and click on Open to open the Import Dialog.

Editing imported assemblies

Because the naming convention used in CLS differs from Eiffel (use of camel case for the former versus combination of lower case and underscores for the later) and because overloading is not supported in Eiffel, the Assembly Manager lets you change the names exposed to Eiffel.

Note: The Assembly Manager will automatically disambiguate overloaded method names. The resulting names might not be very friendly though, this is the main reason for using the Assembly Manager to modify feature names.

To edit an assembly in the Eiffel Assembly Cache:

Open the Imported Assembly Viewer.
Click on the name of the assembly you want to edit.
Click on the Edit toolbar button or select the item Edit in the Tools menu. The Assembly View appears, displaying the list of types in the assembly.
To edit a type, simply click on its Eiffel name. This opens the corresponding Type View where items that can be edited appear italicized.

Note: Only immediate features (i.e. features that are not inherited) and their arguments names are editable. To rename a feature which is inherited (or an argument whose related feature is inherited), open the Type View corresponding to the class where the feature is first declared.

Renaming a class feature

You may edit any feature name which appears italicized. Simply click on the name you wish to modify.

Renaming a feature argument

You can also rename the arguments of features which appear italicized. Simply click on the argument you wish to modify.

The Assembly Manager first checks that your changes are consistent before saving them. In case problems are detected, the list of errors appears at the bottom of the Type View. When you click on an error message, the focus is given to the corresponding item (feature name or feature argument), inviting you to modify it.

Removing assemblies from the Eiffel Assembly Cache

To remove an assembly from the Eiffel Assembly Cache:

Open the Imported Assembly Viewer.
Click on the name of the assembly you want to remove.
Click on the Remove toolbar button or select the item Remove in the Tools menu.
Click Yes in the confirmation dialog.

Note: When you decide to remove an assembly (and possibly its dependencies), you must keep in mind that assembly removal is a one-way process: the only way to "undo" it is to import the assembly again through the Import Tool. Any change that you have previously made to the names of the features and their arguments will be lost.