State-Action Pairs for Contextual Interface Editing

The editing of a user interface resulting from model-to-model and model-to-code transformations in Model-Driven Architecture consists of performing manual changes to address user requirements which have not been supported during the transformations. These requirements may include customization, users’ prefer-ences, and compliance with corporate style guidelines. This paper introduces a editing process into a user-interface model. This process includes a series of beautification operations based on a formal definition, as well as a constrained ed-itor that enables designers to apply these beautification operations on a user inter-face. All manual changes done using these beautification operations are trans-formed into model-to-model transformations, thus reducing the problem of round-trip engineering. The paper also demonstrates that this process significant-ly reduces the number of manual changes performed on user interfaces of infor-mation systems, while preserving the quality properties induced by the transfor-mations