UML22 — Section 11.7

In the manner of representing the relationship between BehavioralFeature and Parameter the infrastructure imposes either a limit on the nature of parameters on modeling languages reusing the infrastructure or forces them to duplicate this mechanism. The infrastructure decided to represent as concrete associations the kinds of parameters, and distinguishes two: returnResult and formalParameter. The parameter association is then derived as a union of these. However, there may be a large number of parameter kinds. For example, the superstructure defines four, and one can easily imagine additional ones. To be more reusable and expandable, parameter should be characterized by its kind (does it return a result, is it a formal parameter). Note that this is, in reality, a property of the parameter, not of the relation between BehavioralFeature and Parameter and thus is modeled better this way anyway. Define an attribute "direction" on Parameter of type "ParameterDirectionKind". In infrastructure give it two values: in, and returnResult. This type can be extended in other languages, e.g., the UML uses also out, and inout). Make BehavioralFeature.parameter concrete. Make the formalParameter and returnResult associations derived from the direction attribute of each parameter. The result is the identical model, but much more reusable. Note that the superstructure was forced to introduce both mechanisms, thus running into the risk of inconsistencies, if the two mechanisms do not match up. There is no negative impact on the infrastructure of relying on the more reusable option proposed here. The number of model elements stored in the repository is identical for infrastructure, and lower for superstructure.

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