Retrieving relationships from declarative files

Software frameworks frequently require developers to interact with them using both OO-based languages and declarative files. The frameworks also require that these declarative files are consistent with the OO code, but it is currently difficult to check this in a generic way. Relationships have shown to be useful for checking constraints within OO code, and as a declarative file is essentially a static list of relationships, they may also be useful for checking constraints within declarative files. However, retrieving relationships from these files has many potential problems. In this paper, we show why it would be useful to retrieve relationships from declarative files, and we explore the hurdles that a solution will have to overcome.