Abstract

A transformation from the source data to a target view is said to be bidirectional if, when the target is altered, the transformation somehow induces a way to reflect the changes back to the source. Several domain-specific bidirectional transformation languages have been proposed. In this paper, we intend to show that most existing unidirectional tree transformations can be made bidirectional. Therefore it may be not really necessary to design new domain-specific languages for bidirectional transformation. As a case study, we consider the combinator library HaXML, which has been widely used in the Haskell community for generating, editing, and transforming XML documents. We show that any transformation in HaXML can be fully compiled into a bidirectional transformation.

Citations