Capella Model Explorer

A webapp for exploring Capella models through simple "auto-generated" textual and graphical views.

Longer story:

We see a larger non-MBSE crowd struggling with the things hidden in the model. With this app we expose model contents in an easy to review readable form with basic graphical annotations. Under the hood it uses Jinja templates enabling the tooling teams to support their users with model-derived documents of any shape and form.

Use cases:

• Provide insights into / "spell-out" the model for non-MBSE stakeholders via document-a-like dynamic views that describe model elements in a human-readable form.
• Provide meaningful default views (that can be further customized) for the key elements to kickstart the model exploration.

There are a few more use cases but we will reveal them a bit later.

Quick start

Clone, then build and run locally with Docker:

docker build -t model-explorer:latest .
docker run --name=cme -e ROUTE_PREFIX="" \
    -v /absolute/path/to/your/model/folder/on/host:/model \
    -v "$PWD/templates:/views" -p 8000:8000 model-explorer

Then open your browser at http://localhost:8000/views and start exploring your model.

While the thing is running you can edit the templates in the templates folder and see the changes immediately in the browser.

Development (local)

To run the app in dev mode you'll need to first run make build-frontend. This is needed by the backend to have some statics to serve. Then run make dev-backend in one terminal and make dev-frontend in another terminal. The backend and statically built frontend will be served at http://localhost:8000. The live frontend will be served by vite at http://localhost:5173 (or similar, it will be printed in the terminal where you ran make dev-frontend).

Installation

You can install the latest released version directly from PyPI.

pip install capella-model-explorer

To set up a development environment, clone the project and install it into a virtual environment.

git clone https://github.com/DSD-DBS/capella-model-explorer
cd capella-model-explorer
python -m venv .venv

source .venv/bin/activate.sh  # for Linux / Mac
.venv\Scripts\activate  # for Windows

pip install -U pip pre-commit
pip install -e '.[docs,test]'
pre-commit install

Development

This repo contains a Makefile with recipes for a few commonly needed tasks during development. Run make help for more details.

Developing the frontend

To develop frontend components, run:

make storybook

To develop the app as a whole, run:

make dev-frontend

Note that this requires a running backend server, see the next section.

Backend development

To run the backend, use the following command:

make run MODEL=../path/to/model.aird

This will start the API server on http://localhost:8000, where it will serve the frontend in production mode. These static files can be rebuilt with make build-frontend, although it is usually more convenient to run the frontend in development mode with make dev-frontend (see above).

The MODEL parameter can be set to anything that capellambse.loadcli understands, but some functionality requires a Git-backed model (e.g. using a git+https:// URL).

Integration in the Capella Collaboration Manager

The Capella Model Explorer can be integrated into the Capella Collaboration Manager.

To do so, you need a running instance of the Capella Collaboration Manager. Navigate to Menu > Settings > Tools > Add a new tool and fill in the following configuration:

name: "Capella model explorer"
integrations:
  t4c: false
  pure_variants: false
  jupyter: false
config:
  resources:
    cpu:
      requests: 0.4
      limits: 2
    memory:
      requests: 1.6Gi
      limits: 6Gi
  environment:
    MODEL_ENTRYPOINT:
      stage: before
      value: "{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSION_PROVISIONING[0][path]}"
    ROUTE_PREFIX: "{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSIONS_BASE_PATH}"
  connection:
    methods:
      - id: f51872a8-1a4f-4a4d-b4f4-b39cbd31a75b
        type: http
        name: Direct Browser connection
        sharing:
          enabled: true
        ports:
          metrics: 8000
          http: 8000
        redirect_url: "{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSIONS_SCHEME}://{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSIONS_HOST}:{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSIONS_PORT}{CAPELLACOLLAB_SESSIONS_BASE_PATH}/"
  monitoring:
    prometheus:
      path: /metrics
  provisioning:
    directory: /models
    max_number_of_models: 1
  persistent_workspaces:
    mounting_enabled: false

You can tune the resources according to your needs.

After saving the configuration, you have to add a version for the new tool. Since the Capella Model Explorer can load different Capella versions, we can use one generic version:

name: "Generic"
config:
  is_recommended: true
  is_deprecated: false
  sessions:
    persistent:
      image: ghcr.io/dsd-dbs/capella-model-explorer/model-explorer:latest
  backups:
    image: null
  compatible_versions: [1, 2, 3, 4]

Replace the numbers in compatible_versions with the version IDs for the versions you want to support.

When configured properly, users will be able to start read-only sessions for the Capella Model Explorer. More information about read-only sessions is available in the Capella Collaboration Manager documentation.

Contributing

We'd love to see your bug reports and improvement suggestions! Please take a look at our guidelines for contributors for details.

Licenses

This project is compliant with the REUSE Specification Version 3.0.

Copyright DB InfraGO AG, licensed under Apache 2.0 (see full text in LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt)

Dot-files are licensed under CC0-1.0 (see full text in LICENSES/CC0-1.0.txt)