NuActionGUI (legacy)

NuActionGUI compiles a data model (.dtm), a security model (.stm) and a privacy model (.ptm) — with OCL constraints — into a Flask web application whose every attribute read, update, association change, creation and deletion is checked against those models at run time.

This is the legacy toolchain, kept so that projects written against its model syntax keep building.

• PyPI: nuactiongui-legacy · command line: nag-legacy · language server: nag-legacy-langserver
• VSCode: NuActionGUI (legacy) (infsec.vscode-nag), see tooling/vscode-nag

Installation

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install "nuactiongui-legacy[apps]"

The apps extra is the Flask stack the generated applications run on. It needs Python 3.10–3.13: Flask-User 1.0.2.2 / Werkzeug 2.2.2 call ast.Str, which 3.14 removed. The compilers, nag-legacy and the language server themselves run on 3.14 too (pip install nuactiongui-legacy without the extra) — nag-legacy --run says so if the interpreter is too new.

No Java is needed: the wheels ship the generated ANTLR parsers.

Usage

nag-legacy --new shop                 # scaffold models/shop/project.{dtm,stm,ptm}
nag-legacy -p shop -o output          # compile the models, generate output/shop
nag-legacy --run shop -o output       # run it (Flask dev server, http://127.0.0.1:5002)
nag-legacy -p shop -o output -re      # regenerate the model-derived files only,
                                      # keeping project.py, project_aux.py, templates, static

-p takes the folder holding the three model files, or a bare name looked up under ./models/<name>. All paths are relative to the current directory. -dm/-sm/-pm override the model file names (project.dtm etc.).

The distribution contains the toolchain only; no example models are bundled.

Errors, and what they mean for older models

Constraints are type-checked against the data model. A type error is fatal, is reported at the constraint, and says what to write instead. Three rules from the successor's OCL dialect are enforced here too — they are what changed for models written against the original toolchain:

The 41 collection operations reachable through -> are: any append asBag asOrderedSet asSequence asSet at collect collectNested count excludes excludesAll excluding exists first flatten forAll includes includesAll including indexOf insertAt intersection isEmpty isUnique iterate last notEmpty oclAsSet one prepend product reject select size sortedBy subOrderedSet subSequence sum symmetricDifference union. size and oclAsSet also work with . on a String / an object respectively.

Two things changed meaning rather than spelling — see the CHANGELOG: operator precedence now follows the OCL specification (a and b or c and d groups as (a and b) or (c and d)), and objects compare by identity, not by attribute values.

Repository layout

nuactiongui_legacy/        the package: cli, pipeline, dtm/stm/ptm compilers,
                           langserver, templates (package data), grammars
tests/                     compiler suites, golden generation tests, language server tests
tooling/vscode-nag/        the VSCode extension

Only nuactiongui_legacy/ is part of the PyPI distribution.

Development

pip install -e ".[apps,dev]"
export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 26)   # the ANTLR tool needs a JDK >= 11
make grammars                                       # regenerate the parsers (guarded, see below)
make test                                           # everything
make dist check-dist test-dist                      # build, verify, install-and-boot per interpreter (3.10-3.14 installed; see RELEASING.md)

nuactiongui_legacy/grammars/OclExpression.g4 is a verbatim copy of the grammar of the pinned ocl-py release, and make grammars refuses to run unless the installed ocl-py and the grammar's digest match. This is not bookkeeping: the security and privacy grammars import that grammar, and a stm parser built from a mismatched one groups and/or differently from the OCL runtime — a silently wrong authorization decision. Bumping ocl-py is documented in RELEASING.md.

make test-generation pins every byte of the generated apps for the test models and the structure of every compiled constraint; a reviewed generator change is accepted with UPDATE_GOLDEN=1 make test-generation.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.