Association Classes on EAAggregations

[Paolo F Cantoni]

In a (fairly) recent post: Aggregation and Association proposal, I discussed a way to resolve the ongoing issue of EA allowing both EAAggregations and UML Associations with AggregationKind.  I've heard nothing from Sparx, so I have to assume there's no progress on that front.

This post relates to the issue of AssociationClasses and EAAggregations.  Given that I can attach an Association Class to an Association with AggregationKind set, it would seem to be consistent to allow us to attach an AssociationClass to an EAAggregation.

I can see some issues for EA with this proposition.  EA uses the t_connector Subtype column (somewhat redundantly since - I think - it also uses the AggregationKind column) to denote the type of EAAggregation:  "Weak" (Shared) or "Strong" (Composite).  EA also uses the Subtype column for an Association to denote an AssociationClass (by setting the value to "Class").  Nevertheless, I feel this can be worked around without too much difficulty.

Since there seems to be no progress on solving the larger problem, the least that should happen is that EAAggregations and UML Association should be treated consistently.

Reported...
Thoughts?
Paolo

[Geert Bellekens]

Obvious, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to add an associationclass to an EAAggregation.

Geert

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Obvious, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to add an AssociationClass to an EAAggregation.

Geert

Yes, this came up because of my bug report: 854: Association Classes incorrectly imported.  I've got an long standing model (over 5 years old) which contains a mixture of Aggregations and Aggregated Associations.  I was trying to standardise and found I couldn't.

I'm going to have a look to see if I can do it via the DB...
[edit]As I predicted, EA gets "Multiple Personality Disorder" if you change the t_connector type from Association to Aggregation while it has the attached Associoation Class.  While the link disappears (after you save the dialog, the link in PDATA1 doesn't.[/edit]
Paolo

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Interesting side-effect of the EAAggregation - Aggregated Association conflation, is that if you create an MDG Technology where some stereotypes extend Association and others extend Aggregation, the stereotype dropdown for both Associations and Aggregations contains BOTH sets of stereotypes!

In addition, since I use the _metatype feature when you open the properties the Association pretends to be an Aggregation (that is, the caption takes its value fro the stereotype (without reference to the metaclass).

Sparxians, you really need to get on top of this...  

Paolo