UML Associations: A Structural and Contextual View.

Abstract

The different kinds of communication links that can exist in an interaction among objects pose the question of whether every link is or is not an instance of an association, and whether an association must exist whenever there is a communication path between objects. The distinction between static and dynamic associations is not adequate to solve this problem, since in object-orientation every association has static and dynamic features, so that these two aspects do not serve to define two disjoint subtypes of association. Instead, we propose the distinction between structural and contextual associations, which, with an adequate redefinition of association and link stereotypes, helps to maintain the principle that every link is an instance of an association, avoiding the baseless link problem.

Computation of Static Execute After Relation with Applications to Software Maintenance

“…Génova et al presented a work on how to cope with dependencies that are less easily observable from the code [12]. However, this work is about distinguishing some less explicit UML associations from firm "knows-about" associations, and not about dealing with dependencies spanning possibly across many classes and message chains.…”

Implementing associations: UML 2.0 to Java 5

“…The most extensive work has been carried out by Génova initially in his PhD thesis [9] with some of the work published with colleagues elsewhere [8,10,11]. Their work gives solutions for implementing binary associations and looks at the semantics of all variations of pre-UML version 2.0 associations.…”

Drawing the line

“…The UML metamodel includes a set of stereotypes for association ends (<<association>>, <<global>>, <<local>>, <<parameter>> and <<self>>) in order to specify ways in which an instance can be visible, but these are not adequate to fully express the range of possible association semantics [2,3].…”

“…For examples, Stevens [2] suggest that associations may be classified as Static, which may be implemented with a class attribute, or Dynamic, where objects may exchange a message without an attribute being defined, for example if the target object reference is a method parameter. Génova et al [3] propose a somewhat similar classification of associations as Structural and Contextual.…”