EMF allows to store the model content via the EMF persistence framework. EMF provides XMI and XML persistence provider. By default EMF uses XMI (XML Metadata Interchange). XMI is a standard for exchanging metadata information via Extensible Markup Language (XML).

The following demonstrates how you create a EMF model instance, save it and load it again.

If you persistent an EMF object all dependent object will automatically be persistent. Objects which do not have a "contains relationship" must be added explicitly to the resource.getContents().add(). If objects are not added and not included in a contains relationship an exception is thrown when calling resource.save()

This article focus on the persistence of EMF models via XMI. For an introduction into Eclipse EMF please see Eclipse EMF .