At this point, I have covered the basics of the class diagram, but do not stop reading yet! In the following sections, I will address more important aspects of the class diagram that you can put to good use. These include interfaces, the three remaining types of associations, visibility, and other additions in the UML 2 specification.
Interfaces
Earlier in this article, I suggested that you think of classifiers simply as classes. In fact, a classifier is a more general concept, which includes data types and interfaces.
A complete discussion of when and how to use data types and interfaces effectively in a system's structure diagrams is beyond the scope of this article. So why do I mention data types and interfaces here? There are times when you might want to model these classifier types on a structure diagram, and it is important to use the proper notation in doing so, or at least be aware of these classifier types. Drawing these classifiers incorrectly will likely confuse readers of your structure diagram, and the ensuing system will probably not meet requirements.
A class and an interface differ: A class can have an actual instance of its type, whereas an interface must have at least one class to implement it. In UML 2, an interface is considered to be a specialization of a class modeling element. Therefore, an interface is drawn just like a class, but the top compartment of the rectangle also has the text "«interface»", as shown in Figure 10. [Note: When drawing a class diagram it is completely within UML specification to put «class» in the top compartment of the rectangle, as you would with «interface»; however, the UML specification says that placing the "class" text in this compartment is optional, and it should be assumed if «class» is not displayed.]
Figure 10: Example of a class diagram in which the Professor and Student classes implement the Person interface
In the diagram shown in Figure 10, both the Professor and Student classes implement the Person interface and do not inherit from it. We know this for two reasons: 1) The Person object is defined as an interface — it has the "«interface»" text in the object's name area, and we see that the Professor and Student objects are class objects because they are labeled according to the rules for drawing a class object (there is no additional classification text in their name area). 2) We know inheritance is not being shown here, because the line with the arrow is dotted and not solid. As shown in Figure 10, a dotted line with a closed, unfilled arrow means realization (or implementation); as we saw in Figure 4, a solid arrow line with a closed, unfilled arrow means inheritance.
More associations
Above, I discussed bi-directional and uni-directional associations. Now I will address the three remaining types of associations.
Association class
In modeling an association, there are times when you need to include another class because it includes valuable information about the relationship. For this you would use an association class that you tie to the primary association. An association class is represented like a normal class. The difference is that the association line between the primary classes intersects a dotted line connected to the association class. Figure 11 shows an association class for our airline industry example.
Figure 11: Adding the association class MileageCredit
In the class diagram shown in Figure 11, the association between the Flight class and the FrequentFlyer class results in an association class called MileageCredit. This means that when an instance of a Flight class is associated with an instance of a FrequentFlyer class, there will also be an instance of a MileageCredit class.
Aggregation
Aggregation is a special type of association used to model a "whole to its parts" relationship. In basic aggregation relationships, the lifecycle of a part class is independent from the whole class's lifecycle.
For example, we can think of Car as a whole entity and Car Wheel as part of the overall Car. The wheel can be created weeks ahead of time, and it can sit in a warehouse before being placed on a car during assembly. In this example, the Wheel class's instance clearly lives independently of the Car class's instance. However, there are times when the part class's lifecycle is not independent from that of the whole class — this is called composition aggregation. Consider, for example, the relationship of a company to its departments. Both Company and Departments are modeled as classes, and a department cannot exist before a company exists. Here the Department class's instance is dependent upon the existence of the Company class's instance.
Let's explore basic aggregation and composition aggregation further.
Basic aggregation
An association with an aggregation relationship indicates that one class is a part of another class. In an aggregation relationship, the child class instance can outlive its parent class. To represent an aggregation relationship, you draw a solid line from the parent class to the part class, and draw an unfilled diamond shape on the parent class's association end. Figure 12 shows an example of an aggregation relationship between a Car and a Wheel.
Figure 12: Example of an aggregation association
Composition aggregation
The composition aggregation relationship is just another form of the aggregation relationship, but the child class's instance lifecycle is dependent on the parent class's instance lifecycle. In Figure 13, which shows a composition relationship between a Company class and a Department class, notice that the composition relationship is drawn like the aggregation relationship, but this time the diamond shape is filled.
Figure 13: Example of a composition relationship
In the relationship modeled in Figure 13, a Company class instance will always have at least one Department class instance. Because the relationship is a composition relationship, when the Company instance is removed/destroyed, the Department instance is automatically removed/destroyed as well. Another important feature of composition aggregation is that the part class can only be related to one instance of the parent class (e.g. the Company class in our example).
Reflexive associations
We have now discussed all the association types. As you may have noticed, all our examples have shown a relationship between two different classes. However, a class can also be associated with itself, using a reflexive association. This may not make sense at first, but remember that classes are abstractions. Figure 14 shows how an Employee class could be related to itself through the manager/manages role. When a class is associated to itself, this does not mean that a class's instance is related to itself, but that an instance of the class is related to another instance of the class.
Figure 14: Example of a reflexive association relationship
The relationship drawn in Figure 14 means that an instance of Employee can be the manager of another Employee instance. However, because the relationship role of "manages" has a multiplicity of 0..*; an Employee might not have any other Employees to manage.
Visibility
In object-oriented design, there is a notation of visibility for attributes and operations. UML identifies four types of visibility: public, protected, private, and package.
The UML specification does not require attributes and operations visibility to be displayed on the class diagram, but it does require that it be defined for each attribute or operation. To display visibility on the class diagram, you place the visibility mark in front of the attribute's or operation's name. Though UML specifies four visibility types, an actual programming language may add additional visibilities, or it may not support the UML-defined visibilities. Table 4 displays the different marks for the UML-supported visibility types.
Table 4: Marks for UML-supported visibility types
| Mark | Visibility type |
|---|---|
| + | Public |
| # | Protected |
| - | Private |
| ~ | Package |
Now, let's look at a class that shows the visibility types indicated for its attributes and operations. In Figure 15, all the attributes and operations are public, with the exception of the updateBalance operation. The updateBalance operation is protected.
Figure 15: A BankAccount class that shows the visibility of its attributes and operations
UML 2 additions
Now that we have covered the basics and the advanced topics, we will cover some of the new notations added to the class diagram from UML 1.x.
Instances
When modeling a system's structure it is sometimes useful to show example instances of the classes. To model this, UML 2 provides the instance specification element, which shows interesting information using example (or real) instances in the system.
The notation of an instance is the same as a class, but instead of the top compartment merely having the class's name, the name is an underlined concatenation of:
Instance Name : Class Name |
For example:
Donald : Person |
Because the purpose of showing instances is to show interesting or relevant information, it is not necessary to include in your model the entire instance's attributes and operations. Instead it is completely appropriate to show only the attributes and their values that are interesting as depicted in Figure 16.
Figure 16: An example instance of a Plane class (only the interesting attribute values are shown)
However, merely showing some instances without their relationship is not very useful; therefore, UML 2 allows for the modeling of the relationships/associations at the instance level as well. The rules for drawing associations are the same as for normal class relationships, although there is one additional requirement when modeling the associations. The additional restriction is that association relationships must match the class diagram's relationships and therefore the association's role names must also match the class diagram. An example of this is shown in Figure 17. In this example the instances are example instances of the class diagram found in Figure 6.
Figure 17: An example of Figure 6 using instances instead of classes
Figure 17 has two instances of the Flight class because the class diagram indicated that the relationship between the Plane class and the Flight class is zero-to-many. Therefore, our example shows the two Flight instances that the NX0337 Plane instance is related to.
Roles
Modeling the instances of classes is sometimes more detailed than one might wish. Sometimes, you may simply want to model a class's relationship at a more generic level. In such cases, you should use the role notation. The role notation is very similar to the instances notation. To model a class's role, you draw a box and place the class's role name and class name inside as with the instances notation, but in this case you do not underline the words. Figure 18 shows an example of the roles played by the Employee class described by the diagram at Figure 14. In Figure 18, we can tell, even though the Employee class is related to itself, that the relationship is really between an Employee playing the role of manager and an Employee playing the role of team member.
Figure 18: A class diagram showing the class in Figure 14 in its different roles
Note that you cannot model a class's role on a plain class diagram, even though Figure 18 makes it appear that you can. In order to use the role notation you will need to use the Internal Structure notation, discussed next.
Internal Structures
One of the more useful features of UML 2 structure diagrams is the new internal structure notation. It allows you to show how a class or another classifier is internally composed. This was not possible in UML 1.x, because the notation set limited you to showing only the aggregation relationships that a class had. Now, in UML 2, the internal structure notation lets you more clearly show how that class's parts relate to each other.
Let's look at an example. In Figure 18 we have a class diagram showing how a Plane class is composed of four engines and two control software objects. What is missing from this diagram is any information about how airplane parts are assembled. From the diagram in Figure 18, you cannot tell if the control software objects control two engines each, or if one control software object controls three engines and the other controls one engine.
Figure 19: A class diagram that only shows relationships between the objects
Drawing a class's internal structure will improve this situation. You start by drawing a box with two compartments. The top compartment contains the class name, and the lower compartment contains the class's internal structure, showing the parent class's part classes in their respective roles, as well as how each particular class relates to others in that role. Figure 19 shows the internal structure of Plane class; notice how the internal structure clears up the confusion.
Figure 20: An example internal structure of a Plane class
In Figure 20 the Plane has two ControlSoftware objects and each one controls two engines. The ControlSoftware on the left side of the diagram (control1) controls engines 1 and 2. The ControlSoftware on the right side of the diagram (control2) controls engines 3 and 4.
Conclusion
There are at least two important reasons for understanding the class diagram. The first is that it shows the static structure of classifiers in a system; the second reason is that the diagram provides the basic notation for other structure diagrams prescribed by UML. Developers will think the class diagram was created specially for them; but other team members will find them useful, too. Business analysts can use class diagrams to model systems from the business perspective. As we will see in other articles in this series on UML basics, other diagrams — including the activity, sequence, and statechart diagrams — refer to the classes modeled and documented on the class diagram.
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