Is Composed Of

[frank]

I am using EA 3.1 build 504,a nd I am new to EA so perhaps I am misunderstanding something.

When I create a simple association (solid lign, nop arrowheads) from class A to class B, the property browser tells me that A "Is composed of" B, which is not the case.  I cannot seem to create an association which is not represented by the property browser as either inheritence or aggregation.

Is this a bug or am I just misunderstanding the intention?

Frank.

[jaimeglz]

Hi frank, welcome to this forum.

A couple of questions, which I hope will help the forum community to answer your question:

1. How do you obtain "is composed of" information in the "properties browser"?
2. How did you create the association between class A and class B? Did you choose "associate" from the tools bar, or did you choose another type of association?

I'll be very busy the rest of the afternoon, but I'll take a look at the forum tonight.

Jaime Gonzalez

[frank]

1. How do you obtain "is composed of" information in the "properties browser"?

At the bottom of the property browser I see 5 tabs.  The fifth one has a picture that looks like a class diagram.  If I select that tab and then select Class A I get a display like this:

- Class A
 - <symbol> is composed of
      Class B

2. How did you create the association between class A and class B? Did you choose "associate" from the tools bar, or did you choose another type of association?

Trivial case:

Start with a blank diagram.
Create class A and Class B by clicking on the class icon in the tool bar.
Click on Associate in the toolbar
Drag from Class A to Class B

Frank.

[jaimeglz]

Hi again, frank.

I looked at the fifth tab in the properties browser in one of my own diagrams and I also got the aggregation symbol and "composed of", instead of "associated with".

I am completely sure I have (as you do) an association between two classes, and I have not specified aggregation in any of the association ends.

This seems to be a glitch in the properties browser, because these associations work correctly for everything else, and they appear correctly (as associations) in my documentation. It doesn't seem to affect anything else.

To check your association type, double click on your class and click on the "Links" tab of the class properties dialog. You will see it correctly listed as an association (as you will see inheritance relationships correctly listed as generalizations).

Tell you the truth: I've been working with EA for more than six months, and had not noticed this glitch because I don't recall having used that tab in the properties browser.

I hope Sparx makes a note of this; however, it looks to me to be a small problem.

Jaime

[frank]

Thanks for the confirmation!  More importantly, thank you for confirming that this is a display only problem that will not affect the integrity of the model.

Frank.

[gsparks]

Hi all,

My apologies for not doing something about this sooner - things have been extraordinarily hectic with the changes for release 3.5. Once 3.5 is out I will attend to this and try and get the fix into the first build after that.

Once the release is out we will be going back to about a fortnightly build cycle - we had to put that on hold while there were major database changes happening for this release.

Thanks for your patience,

Geoff Sparks