Editing Round-trip engineering (section)

== Limitations ==
A 2005 book on [[Visual Studio]] notes for instance that a common problem in RTE tools is that the model reversed is not the same as the original one, unless the tools are aided by leaving laborious annotations in the source code.<ref name="FilevLoton2005">{{cite book|author1=Andrew Filev|author2=Tony Loton|author3=Kevin McNeish |author4=Ben Schoellmann |author5=John Slater |author6=Chaur G. Wu|title=Professional UML Using Visual Studio .Net|year=2005|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-0-7645-5875-7|page=181}}</ref> The behavioral parts of UML impose even more challenges for RTE.

Usually, UML class diagrams are supported to some degree; however, certain UML concepts, such as ''associations'' and ''containment'' do not have straightforward representations in many programming languages which limits the usability of the created code and accuracy of code analysis/reverse engineering (e.g., containment is hard to recognize in the code).

A more tractable form of round-trip engineering is implemented in the context of framework [[application programming interface]]s (APIs), whereby a model describing the usage of a framework API by an application is synchronized with that application's code. In this setting, the API ''prescribes'' all correct ways the framework can be used in applications, which allows precise and complete detection of API usages in the code as well as creation of useful code implementing correct API usages. Two prominent RTE implementations in this category are [[framework-specific modeling language]]s and [[Spring Roo]] (Java).

Round-trip engineering is critical for maintaining consistency among multiple models and between the models and the code in [[Object Management Group]]'s (OMG) [[Model-driven architecture]]. OMG proposed the [[QVT]] (query/view/transformation) standard to handle model transformations required for MDA. To date{{When|date=July 2023}}, a few implementations of the standard have been created. (Need to present practical experiences with MDA in relation to RTE).