Language Concept

→ a language concept can be any syntactic or semantic programming language construct that may be relevant for the analysis with jQAssistant

• an individual language concept object is usually represented by a single node or connection in the property graph of Neo4j
• concept objects may be nested
• every concept object type has a unique String ID used by concept maps

Examples:

• source code file
• a class declaration
• a method declaration
• a dependency between two classes

Implementation

classDiagram
	class Concept {
		<<abstract>>
		+String CONCEPT_ID$
		+Map~String, Object~ metadata
		+toJSON() Map
	}
	class ConcreteConcept {
		+String CONCEPT_ID = "concrete-id"$
		+String someConceptProperty
	}
	Concept <|-- ConcreteConcept

• all classes modeling language concepts should inherit from abstract Concept class
• CONCEPT_ID field of Concept class should be static and abstract
• toJSON() should contain no processing logic and specifically exclude any values stored under metadata
  • as it usually returns all non-metadata basic fields per default, it can be provided as a default implementation by the Concept base class
  • the return value should be some object or collection that can easily be exported to a JSON file