Model and Data Differences in an Enterprise Low-Code Platform

The comparison of versions and variants of models is a well-known challenge in model-driven software engineering. In the context of low-code platforms, models are rarely textonly and the modelers are not necessarily familiar with programming. Therefore, presenting the comparison results in an understandable way and on a suitable level of abstraction is a challenging problem vital, e.g., for enabling asynchronous collaborative low-code development. This paper describes an approach for calculating and displaying differences between versions or variants of models in A12, a low-code platform for enterprise applications that employs different types of models to represent data and its presentation. The differencing infrastructure is built of reusable modules to avoid redundancies of its commonalities across different A12 model types. Despite that, it can be applied for calculating and displaying differences of data conforming to models in low-code applications. The approach has been developed for A12, but the concepts behind it are supposed to be transferable to other low-code platforms.