P APYRUS U SER G UIDE S ERIES

About the diagram stylesheets, version 0.9.1

This document is part of a series of documents called, Papyrus User

Guides Series, and dedicated to assist the usage of Papyrus. The focus of
this volume is to describe the process to customize the Papyrus Diagram
Appearance, with the support of Stylesheets.

Camille Letavernier, CEA, LIST, Laboratory of model driven

engineering for embedded systems

27/09/2012

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Table of Contents
Historic of the document .............................................................................. 2
Introduction .................................................................................................. 3
Installation .................................................................................................... 4
Using StyleSheets ......................................................................................... 6
Editing a StyleSheet ..................................................................................... 7
Manually: The CSS Syntax ................................................................................. 7
Syntax elements ............................................................................................... 7
Examples .......................................................................................................... 8
With the Papyrus tooling. ................................................................................... 8

Manipulating styles .................................................................................... 10

Deploying a CSS Theme ............................................................................. 11
Limitations & issues ................................................................................... 12
Selectors ............................................................................................................. 12
Selector inheritance ....................................................................................... 12
Profile/Stereotype support ............................................................................. 12
Labels and compartments .............................................................................. 12
Events support ............................................................................................... 12
Stylesheets ......................................................................................................... 12
Model stylesheets ........................................................................................... 12
Workspace stylesheets ................................................................................... 12
Bugs ................................................................................................................... 12

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ISTORIC OF THE DOCUMENT

Version #

Contributors
<Name>, <Affiliation>

0.9.1

Camille Letavernier, CEA,

LIST, Laboratory of model
driven engineering for
embedded systems

Comments
This is the initial version of the document.
It is based on the Papyrus version 0.9.1.

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NTRODUCTION

The standard UML specification provides a few hints to represent graphical

elements. However, it only focuses on the general representation of these
elements (e.g. A Class is a rectangle, with optional compartments for its
attributes and operations, and its name should be displayed in italic if the Class
is abstract).
Nevertheless, for a better readability (and even esthetic), the user has a certain freedom
for changing some graphical properties, such as an Elements color. Until now, in
Papyrus, this customization could be done by two complement means:
-

Appearance tab (Properties view): change the appearance of the selected

element(s)
Preferences page: change the initial appearance of all newly created element(s)

While this allows defining a custom theme for our diagrams, this mechanism suffers
from a few limitations:
-

It is not possible to create different categories of appearance for the same

semantic Element (e.g. Blue Class and Green class). Wed have to create
Blue classes and change some of them to Green manually.
If we wanted to change the current theme, wed have either to change each
objects appearance one by one, or to write an automatic transformation, which
could be really complicated.
It is not easy to export a Theme, as they are stored in the Eclipse preferences. It
is almost impossible to ship a ready-to-use distribution of Papyrus with a custom
theme.

The release of Eclipse 4 Juno this summer gave us the opportunity to rely on their CSS
Engine to support Cascading StyleSheets in Papyrus diagrams. Just like in web pages,
the CSS format is used to separate the contents of our diagrams from their appearance.
It becomes possible to change the appearance of a whole diagram, or even a set of
diagrams, independently of the number of represented elements, in a single click.

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NSTALLATION
The CSS Stylesheet support is not shipped in the base installation of Papyrus.
However, it can be easily installed from the Papyrus discovery site. Select
Help, Install Papyrus Additional Components, and check Diagram
Stylesheets.

Figure 1 - Installing Stylesheets

Press finish, restart Eclipse, and thats it.

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Your diagrams should now look like the following:

Figure 2 - Without theme

Figure 3 - With CSS Support

Note: If you opened a diagram which has been created without the CSS Support, it may
still have a custom appearance, e.g. without Element icons. This might or might not be a
problem, as this may conflict with the CSS Theme. You can reset all custom appearances
by pressing the Default style button in the Style tab of the Diagrams properties view.

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SING

STYLESHEETS

To define a custom style, the first step is to create a Stylesheet. The

creation is really straightforward: a Stylesheet is a text file with the .css
extension. You can create such a file using the New > File wizard.

Then, you need to associate this file with your diagram. Select a diagram, and then go to
the Style tab of the properties view, and add a new Diagram style sheet. There isnt
currently any style sheet available from the diagram, so you need to create a new
Stylesheet reference.

Figure 4 - Import Style sheet

Browse your workspace to find your css file, and then validate. Your stylesheet is now
associated to your diagram.

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DITING A

STYLESHEET

Papyrus Stylesheets are stored in text files with the .css extension (e.g.
stylesheet.css).

Manually: The CSS Syntax

Syntax elements
The CSS syntax is a list of rules, which associates selectors and properties.
-

The selector: describes the condition which has to be fulfilled for a rule to be
applied
The properties: describes the appearance of the elements matching the rule

Eclipse implements the 2.1 version of the CSS syntax. The available selectors are:
-

*: matches all elements

ElementType: Matches the elements of type ElementType
.myStyle: Matches the elements on which the style myStyle is applied
#myID: Matches the element with the CSS ID myID. The CSS ID must be
unique among a diagram. To avoid confusing the users, and because this selector
doesnt make much sense on diagrams, this selector has been disabled in
Papyrus.
[property=value]: Matches the elements which have a property property with
the value value.

The pseudo-selectors are currently not used in Papyrus.

These selectors can be combined using one of the following combinators:
-

Selector1 Selector2: Descendant selector. Matches the elements which

Selector2 and are contained in an element matching Selector1
Selector1 > Selector2: Child selector. Matches the elements which
Selector2 and are directly contained in an element matching Selector2
Selector1 + Selector2: Sibling selector. Matches the elements which
Selector2 and are immediately preceded by a Sibling element which
Selector1.
Selector1, Selector2: Alternative selector. Matches elements matching
Selector1 or Selector2

match
match
match
match
either

A rule also contains a list of properties, in the form property:value;

In Papyrus, the selectors apply to semantic elements and properties (i.e. UML
Elements), and the properties apply to the appearance properties (i.e. GMF Appearance
properties). A few custom properties (Independent from the GMF Appearance model) are
also available.

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Examples
* {
fillColor: red;
fontColor: #0000FF;
}
Meaning: all elements should be filled in red, and all texts should be blue (RGB Color
#0000FF)
Class {
gradient: white vertical;
elementIcon:true;
shadow:true;
qualifiedNameDepth:full;
}
Meaning: this style applies to all UML Classes. They will have a white and vertical
gradient. The Element icon and the shadow will be displayed, as well as their fully
qualified name.
ClassDiagram Class>Property {
fontColor: red;
}
Meaning: The properties directly contained in a Class, which is drawn on a
ClassDiagram (Either as a root element of the diagram, or in a Package) will be
displayed in red.

With the Papyrus tooling.

Papyrus also provides a tool to generate a CSS Rule from an element displayed in the
diagram. You need to create a stylesheet before you can edit it with the Create style tool,
and it is recommended (Although not required) to associate this style sheet with your
current diagram.
To use it, create an element and change its appearance via the Appearance tab of the
properties view. Then, right click on the element, and select Format, Create a new
style. The dialog box contains three tabs:
-

Conditions: The conditions under which the style will be applied (Corresponds to
the CSS Selectors)
Properties: The graphical properties to export to the style sheet
Stylesheet: The style sheet to edit

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Figure 5 - Create style dialog

In the Stylesheet tab, select your stylesheet:

-

If you have already associated the style sheet to your diagram, you can use the
Applies stylesheet button.
Otherwise, you need to select External stylesheet, and browse your workspace
to retrieve the file. Note that in this case, as the edited stylesheet might not be
applied to your diagram, you wont be able to see the changes in the current
diagram.

In the conditions tab, there are three groups of options:

-

The kind of element to which the style applies (e.g. the style will be applied to
Class elements, or to any kind of elements). It can be restricted to a specific
diagram.
You can add restrictions on the current value(s) of the element (e.g. the style will
be applied to concrete classes). Only primitive type and enumerated attributes
are supported here.
The style name is used to apply a style manually.

The properties tab contains all the graphical properties that can be applied to the
selected object. It is used to choose the graphical properties to apply on the objects
matching the conditions.

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ANIPULATING STYLES
The computed styles will be applied automatically. For example, if
your stylesheet tells that all your abstract classes must be red, the
classes color will change automatically according to the value of their
isAbstract property.

In some other cases, however, you may want to specify manually the style that should be
applied to your objects. For this case, you can use the Applied styles property in the
Style tab of the properties view.
.myOwnStyle {
fillColor: #A6C198;
gradient:white horizontal;
}

Once a style is applied on an object, the object will be refreshed each time the style
definition changes. For example, changing the style myOwnStyle to the following
declaration:
.myOwnStyle {
fillColor: #E3A49C;
gradient: #FFFFFF horizontal;
}
All the green classes will become red.

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EPLOYING A

CSS THEME

Once you have defined your style sheet, you may want to export it to
create a new theme (Or to extend an existing theme). To do so, Papyrus
provides an extension point: org.eclipse.papyrus.infra.gmfdiag.css.theme.

This extension point needs two entries: a Theme Definition (ID, Label and icon of the
Theme), and Theme contributions (A set of style sheets which will compose the Theme).
More than one plug-in can contribute to the same Theme, which makes it possible to
extend a Theme.
The Theme can be modified from the Papyrus preferences page CSS Theme. Only one
theme can be activated at the same time. A Theme applies to all Papyrus Diagrams from
the workspace.

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IMITATIONS

& ISSUES

There are currently a few identified limitations to the Stylesheet

framework, as well as a few minor bugs.

Selectors
Currently, it is not possible to handle complex selectors in the Papyrus stylesheets.

Selector inheritance
It is not possible to apply a style to all descendant of a given Metaclass. For example, a
Behavior will not inherit styles from a Class, although a Behavior actually is a Class.

Profile/Stereotype support
It is not possible to restrict a selector to an applied stereotype. There is currently no way
to specify that a style should only apply to classes on which the SysML::Blocks::Block
stereotype is applied.

Labels and compartments

It is currently not possible to customize labels from the Stylesheets (e.g. show/hide type
for all properties). It is not possible to show/hide or collapse compartments either (e.g.
hide the nested classifier compartment in a Class).

Events support
Selectors based on user events are not yet implemented. For example, the CSS
specification defines the :hover pseudo-selector to represent an element hovered by the
mouse, which is not yet supported in Papyrus.

Stylesheets
Model stylesheets
Currently, stylesheets can only be applied to a Diagram. It is not yet possible to apply a
stylesheet on a Model.

Workspace stylesheets
The only way to define a workspace theme is through the use of a plug-in which defines
a new extension. It is not yet possible to create a new local theme from the preferences
page.

Bugs
The following bugs have been identified:

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372322: [Diagram - Refresh] The refresh action is not correctly binded to F5
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=372322
386574: [CSS - Refresh] Only the active diagram is refresh when the stylesheets change
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=386574
390534: [CSS - Appearance] Undoing graphical changes results in unexpected behavior
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=390534

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