How can I print the AST from ASTEmbeddedAutomaton to a text file using the generated PrettyPrinter from Monticore?

Question

I already made MontiCore generate the PrettyPrinter classes with the options explained in Configure pom.xml to generate PrettyPrinters for MontiCore Languages .

How can I generate the formatted text output of my MontiArcAutomaton (Type: ASTEmbeddedAutomaton) ?

Answer 1

After asking the MontiCore team, the following solution turned out be a good approach: I wrote a helper class for pretty printing the embedded automaton ASTNode (see Listing 1). This helper class can be used eg with the following code line:

System.out.println(PrettyPrintFactory.getInstance().printNode(autMoore));

Listing 1:

import mc.ast.ASTCNode;
import mc.ast.PrettyPrinter;
import mc.helper.IndentPrinter;
import mc.maautomaton._prettyprint.MontiArcAutomatonConcretePrettyPrinter;

/**
* Prints the AST-Content to a file
**/
public class PrettyPrintFactory {

  private static PrettyPrintFactory instance;
  private PrettyPrinter pretty;

  public static PrettyPrintFactory getInstance() {
    if (instance == null) {
      instance = new PrettyPrintFactory();
    }
    return instance;
  }

  private PrettyPrintFactory() {
         pretty = new PrettyPrinter();
         pretty.addConcretePrettyPrinter(new MontiArcAutomatonConcretePrettyPrinter());
  }

  /** prints the syntax of the astNode to a String */
  public String printNode(ASTCNode astNode) {
         IndentPrinter ip = new IndentPrinter();
         pretty.prettyPrint(astNode, ip);
         return ip.getContent();
  }
}