Regarding the UML model storage as a UML modeling tool, the most used solution is the UML repository in XMI. This solution presents the following troubles :
A little error in model can make the entire repository unreadable.
eUML2 uses a Java annotation solution. It consists to store the UML model in the corresponding Java source. For the JDK 1.4, the solution we used is the XDoclet approach: to store the UML in Java Doc with a specific tag @uml.
The eUML2 Java annotation is classified as two categories:
These annotations are used to store the UML model data.
These annotations are used to control the Java code merge or generation behaviors.