Building Profiles

[Thomas Mercer-Hursh]

Having done a couple versions of defining on paper a profile for the ABL language and Progress database, I am ready to start building a Profile in EA 7.0 and I could use a few hints.

The first obvious question is what is best practice for this kind of work.  My instinct is to create a new separate project for the purpose which is not contaminated with any real system.  My instinct is to include the data model and class model since, at this point I believe the profile is limited to these areas, although I might branch into other areas downstream.  OK so far?

I presume that, as soon as I have anything new defined, I should delete the elements which come in by default.

Having done the bit from the help of More Tools|UML|Profile and dragging the Profile onto the class diagram named System I run into two immediate questions.

One is that the first part of the profile I was going to define was the database tables.  Do they actually belong here?

The other is that the first stereotype I was going to define is for the database, which I was thinking of as a Package.  I can easily create the metaclass component for package, but stereotype seems to be a Class.

That in turn raises two questions.

One is how would one define a stereotype for anything other than a Class?

The other is whether it seems appropriate that a database is a collection of tables and corresponds to a Package.