Derivation is useful to remove the need for repeating definitions.

Suppose you have this model:

An apartment has occupants that may have pets of different breeds.

Suppose your logic calls for frequent subsets of information, maybe like this:

3 different derivations of this model:

• Apartment.TheDogs = self.Occupants.Pets->select(p|p.PetType.Breed='Dog')
• Apartment.Grownups = self.Grownups->select(x|x.Age>=18)
• Apartment.AreThereDogs = self.TheDogs->size>0

All is well and everyone is happy, until you want to do a search in the database – when the OCL or Linq gets translated to SQL…

The problem is that the derivations are at the model level and are not available in persistent storage…

To remove the need for retyping the same definition again when you want to fetch in PS, it would be much better to use the derived association by translating it into persistent members.

This is what we want to do:

var ocl=EcoServiceHelper.GetEcoService<IOclService>(EcoSpace);var exp1 = ocl.ExpandDerivationsInExpression("Apartment.allinstances.TheDogs->select(x|x.Name='Benji')", null, false, null);var exp2 = ocl.ExpandDerivationsInExpression("Apartment.allinstances.Grownups->intersection(Apartment.allinstances.TheDogs.Owner)", null, false, null);And the result in exp1 and exp2 are:

exp1=Apartment.allinstances.Occupants.Pets->select(p|p.PetType.Breed = 'Dog')->select(x|x.Name = 'Benji')

exp2=Apartment.allinstances.Occupants->select(x|x.Age >= 18)->intersection(
                      Apartment.allinstances.Occupants.Pets->
                             select(p|p.PetType.Breed = 'Dog').Owner)

The MDriven Framework does the expansion for you so that you can keep and maintain as few and small definitions as possible.

This new functionality surfaces here:

• In IOclService:
• In IOclPsService:
• In PSQuery and EcoQuery PS (same); automatically expands derivations PS fetch.

The SearchLogic that Wecpof uses; automatically expands derivations PS fetch.

This is the suggested solution to this discussion.