Ability to show association as attribute or link

[Jonathan Byrne]

I apologize in advance if there is a way to do this that I have not found.  

I would like the ability to show association as attribute or link or both.  Sometimes I want to keep a diagram simple and only have a handful of classes.  In that case, I usually want associations displayed as attributes on the class.  In other cases, I want the associations displayed as a links between the classes.  

It would be great if I could right click on an association link and select "show as attribute" or right click on an attribute and select "show as link".

[qwerty]

I agree that this would be something good. Especially as association and attribute are just different renderings of the same thing.

However, I doubt that EA will support this as internally connectors and attributes are "different things" to EA.

q.

[MrSOA]

I might be so bold as to suggest that, in the diagram properties dialog, an option be added to show association roles (like the options to show attributes and operations - to include inherited associations).  It would also be useful if there were symbols assigned for each kind of relationship (dependency, association, aggregation at a minimum).

Does an association have to be implemented as an attribute of one or more of the endpoints, or are there other implementation options?  What if the relationship itself were implemented as a class?  Would that solve some of the problems in the solution?

[qwerty]

I do not exactly understand what you mean with the diagram properties. Can you elaborate on that?

The second part (relationship as class) is definitely not possible. If you do it like this you have an association class. But that requires the relation itself to be bound to it. The problem is that EA has introduced relations as 2nd class citizens in the basic model. To solve the issues talked about here you would need to actually make a new incompatible EA version. And Sparx obviously does not like to do such a thing.

q.