Documenting association classes.

[Glassboy]

For the sake of argument, we have a class called Airline and a class called AirlinePartnership.  We create an Association Class between them  which we call Airline_AirlinePartnership.

The Traceability view shows an association between Airline and AirlinePartnership.  It shows no relationship between Airline_AirlinePartnership and any other element.  A quick and ugly document template focusing on Elements | Connector also fails to reveal the Association Class.

The documentation says

An Association Class is a UML construct that enables an Association to have attributes and operations (features). This results in a hybrid relation with the characteristics of an Association and a Class.

However outside of the diagram all of these attributes and operations aren't reflected as part of the Association.

The diamond notation seems to have a further problem in that I end up with a three way association (not an Association Class) and the source and target of the association is broken because of the hop in the middle.

Am I missing something or is this a shortcoming in EA?

[Geert Bellekens]

You should be able to report on the association class from its owning package, or from a diagram that shows this class.

If you however want to report it together with the association (which makes sense of course) I think you'll need to write an SQL or script fragment.

It might be worth to send in a feature request for it.

Geert

[Glassboy]

Yeah Geert, you can document it from the Package or diagram, but unless you're structured in the way you name your association classes there's no way of knowing what it relates to.

My SQL is also a bit too rusty to quickly write a fragment to include it.  But more importantly it's such a basic thing I don't feel that I should.  It actually makes me wonder whether I should be advocating for wider use of EA within my org.

[Geert Bellekens]

 But more importantly it's such a basic thing I don't feel that I should.  It actually makes me wonder whether I should be advocating for wider use of EA within my org.

I agree. Make sure to send in a feature request

Geert

[Glassboy]

 But more importantly it's such a basic thing I don't feel that I should.  It actually makes me wonder whether I should be advocating for wider use of EA within my org.

I agree. Make sure to send in a feature request

Geert

Yes i thought that was a wise point, so I logged one straight away.