Modeling question: Comm with another system

[han]

Hi everybody,

I am pretty new to EA, and not too familiar with UML too . I am looking for a way to model the following

I have a system A that has to communicate with another system, B. B offers an interface with an operation. The operation takes one or two attributes from a class, that contains much more attributes. It returns a set of data containing attributes from various different classes.

I have the interface class model defined already. If I add parameters to the operation, I seem only to be able to add entire classes. Not single attributes. Am I overlooking some feature of EA, or am I doing something else wrong here??

What I really want is to specify the communication with the other system. How does one specify an activity that is communicating with another system, for instance to get information about an address based on the zip code?

ANY help is appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

Han.

[thomaskilian]

Open the class by dbl-click. Goto Detail. Press Operations. Here you can add Operations and define parameters. You can add any parameter using the Edit button near the Parameters property.

[jeshaw2]

What I really want is to specify the communication with the other system. How does one specify an activity that is communicating with another system, for instance to get information about an address based on the zip code?

You might consider an interaction diagram or a Protocol Statemachine.  Another approach might be a partitioned activity diagram.  Depends on just what aspects of the messaging activity you wish to put forward.

[han]

Hi again,

Thanks for the replies! I wasn't too far away from modelling this, but the answers inspired me on doing it a little bit different.

Thanks!!

Han.

[jeshaw2]

I should have mentioned this before.  If you want a textual description of the messaging, you could also use a UseCase where the system initiating the interaction would be the "actor".