Collection associations in class designer

I see that Ramesh on the class designer team has posted a note about collection associations. The basic idea is that when visualising code one can choose to elide the collection class, so, for example, you'll see an association from Customer to Order instead of an association from Customer to IList.  

This may seem a small matter, but when I used to teach OO design and programming, any first sketch of the design as a UML class diagram would almost always elide the collection class. So it used to really annoy me that when it came to writing out the code, the class diagrams which we produced in TogetherJ could not maintain this elision - not if you wanted to keep diagram and code in sync. This made the diagrams far less useful for communicating a design than they could have been. (There are many great features that the Together tool offered, but its treatment of associations always used to bug me.)

So, hats off to the CD team for getting this aspect just right.

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2005
  e·lide Pronunciation Key (-ld)
  tr.v. e·lid·ed, e·lid·ing, e·lides
  
  1.
  1. To omit or slur over (a syllable, for example) in pronunciation.
  2. To strike out (something written).
  2.
  1. To eliminate or leave out of consideration.
  2. To cut short; abridge.
  
• Anonymous
  March 05, 2005
  Funnily enough, this topic just came up on the Yahoo! group for my site. I think a lot of developers get very confused about collections in UML models and their relationship to multiplicity. Having some in-built understanding in the tool would help enormously.