UML23 — New proposal for conjugate types for ports

The SoaML submission team understands the concerns about making UML extensions at all, let alone introducing changes too high up in the hierarchy that might introduce additional unintended inheritance issues. But we are also reluctant to submit to the UPMS RFP without addressing the need to distinguish services from requests, and without addressing the usability issues that result from the need to create separate types for both ends of a connector.

Recall that the problem is that ports appear on two ends of a connector. It is very often the case that consumers and providers can agree on the provided and required interfaces, and the interaction characteristics (protocol) and should therefore be able to use the same type to highlight that agreement. This is not possible with UML2. Ports don't have direction to indicate whether the owning component is using the operations or providing them. So users are forced to create "conjugate" types that flip the usage and realization relationships between classes and interfaces. This is especially troubling for the common simple case where the port is typed by a simple Interface.

There have been a number of suggestions about how to solve this problem, many involving how ports define provided and required interfaces, and whether they need a type at all. We wanted to solve this problem without making a lot of changes to UML that may have other unintended consequences, or not sufficiently address the issues. So our updated proposal is very simple, and hopefully not something that would in any way effect future changes to UML2.

We suggest the addition of a new Enumeration called PortDirection which has literals incoming and outgoing. Then add a new ownedAttribute to Port called direction: PortDirection = incoming. This would provide a direction on port that would be used to change how the provided and required interfaces are calculated. If direction=incoming, then the provided interfaces are those realized by the port's type and the required interfaces are those used by its type. If the direction is outgoing, the calculations are reversed: the provided interfaces are those used by the port's type, and the required interfaces are those realized by the port's type. Therefore, provided and required interfaces are calculated from the point of view of the owner of the port based on whether they are using the capabilities defined by the port's type, or providing them.

This does not provide similar capabilities for things like connected collaborationRole Properties in a Collaboration. These properties are of course not Ports, and there is no specific specialization of Property (i.e., Role) that distinguishes the usage of a property in a collaboration that could specify the direction from other usages of property where direction is not relevant. We will miss that capability, but don't want to expand the scope of the UML change to address it at this time. Rather we'll wait and see if the UML2 RTF comes up with a more general solution that is also consistent with port direction.

Is this acceptable?

This is a verbatim duplicate of 13080 which I will address soon.

Revised Text:
None.

Disposition: Duplicate.