New RTist Deliverables Now Available for Download

As a result of our Sprint 2021.04, there are now two deliveries available for download: HCL RTist 11.0 2021.04 and experimental version 11.1 2021.04.

Although the experimental version is not yet recommended for production use, we would greatly value any feedback you may have on it. Feel free to reach out to the development team.

For now, let’s take a look at what’s new:

Single-command Scripted Installation

Installation of HCL RTist has never been easier! Just download the script from this page in Utilities section and after a simple configuration, given a product zip file it will automatically download corresponding Eclipse version and depending on RTist version being installed will perform all necessary configuration and installation steps to get you going in minutes.

Visualization of Event Routing

Complex UML RT models often have many levels of nested capsules, making it difficult to analyze how events are travelling through these structures. In Sprint 2021.04 HCL RTist provides experimental Event Routing Visualization feature, which generates a read-only view of all possible communication paths and relevant parts with respect to a certain port. Despite the new view cannot be used to change the model, you can pan and zoom the diagram, filter to only show paths for In or Out events and switch root capsule context with “Go Inside” and “Go Outside” commands. Please keep in mind that to try this feature you should first activate it in Experimental Features Preferences page.

Simpler Qualified Names

In many places in RTist like e.g. Properties view you could see fully qualified names of UML elements. Qualified Name of an element includes names of all owning model elements up to the model’s root separated by ::. However Capsule Development viewpoint simplifies model representation by hiding some types of elements in Project Explorer view, for example Regions in statemachines. Starting from Sprint 2021.04 fully qualified names in Find Named Element dialog, Code View hints, and Properties view are viewpoint aware. In case of Capsule Development viewpoint this results in shorter, easier to understand qualified names especially for nested states.

C++ 11 Initializers Support Improvements

C++ 11 provides new ways to initialize data members of a class called brace and equal initializations. This is in addition to previously existed constructor and assignment initializations. In RTist, you can also configure which kind to use by means of C++ General section of the Properties view for the corresponding Attribute. In this Sprint initializers support was streamlined in the following way. If Initializer Kind is brace or equal it will normally be generated in the header file, otherwise in .cpp file. Taking this into account, you should be careful in using brace or equal initializers for global variables to avoid duplicate declarations in every .cpp file that includes the corresponding header. However if constexpr keyword is used, the initialization will be always generated in the header file. Enjoy the C++ 11 features with errorless builds.

Be sure to check out our Sprint Demo YouTube Playlist to see these and many other advancements in action.