New Edge type: AssociationEnd

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Elsewhere (such as: [size=13]Re: Association Class Vs Associative Tables[/size] and [size=13]Re: Navigability[/size])  I have referred to the fact that EA does not specifically support the edge type of AssociationEnd.  While this is not, of itself, a UML requirement; it would be very useful to have a specific edge type to allow us to distinguish between the edges that are the n-ary AssociationEnds that form the AssociationClass (or Lozenge) identifying tuple and the ordinary associations that exist between the AssociationClass and other classes.

So far we have used a "weirdly" constructed and coloured Association to do the job, but we've determined that we don't have enough control over rendering to enable it to be distinctive enough.  We would like, for example, to have the line as a dashed line, but allow the rendering of the Composite Aggregation (filled) diamond at the "wrong" end.  We can't get EA to render an Association with a dashed line (even via the Database "back door").

Having a specific AssociationEnd edge type (with appropriate rendering) would be very useful.  Our preference is to create a dashed line with a filled diamond a the destination end.

Thoughts? Votes?
Paolo

[size=0]©2007 Paolo Cantoni, -Semantica-[/size]

[«Midnight»]

Yes Paolo,

I like the idea.

We could take this further. Perhaps (via shape scripts or whatever) we could render each segment of a connector with a different line type.

This could help in some tricky diagramming situations, particularly when working through the API.

This would also give us a nice bridge to some other metamodel notations that, for example, use different line styles for source and destination segments of each line.

David

[Paolo F Cantoni]

IN a related topic ([size=13]Re: New Edge type: "Custom"[/size]),  Sparxian Simon provides a shape script that can be applied to an Association (in this case, stereotyped in a specific way).

However, while that helps get around my immediate problem of introducing a dashed line for an Association (stereotyped as  «end»).  An AssociationEnd is not an Association, it's the unary part of the n-ary relation.  So could we please have the type?

Paolo

[size=0]©2007 Paolo Cantoni, -Semantica-[/size]

[«Midnight»]

Well said Paolo,

And I'll add my vote again here, for the distinction you've made here.

While I too appreciate the suggestion in the other post, we're still left with this problem (and opportunity, IMHO).

David