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  1. OMG Issue

UMLR — Unexpected trigger reception has contradictory results in Protocol State Machines

  • Key: UMLR-660
  • Status: open  
  • Source: Change Vision ( Michael Chonoles)
  • Summary:

    On page 340, we have a definition of a unexpected trigger reception.
    14.4.3.2.1 Unexpected trigger reception
    The interpretation of the reception of an Event occurrence that does not match a valid trigger for the current State, state invariant, or pre-condition is not defined (e.g., it can be ignored, rejected, or deferred; an exception can be raised; or the application can stop on an error). It corresponds semantically to a pre-condition violation, for which no predefined Behavior is defined in UML

    However, in 14.4.3.2.3 under Unreferred Operations. We have:
    Unreferred Operations
    If a BehavioralFeature is not referred by any ProtocolTransition, then the operation can be called for any State of the ProtocolStateMachine, and will not change the current State or pre- and post-conditions.


    The problem I have is that an Unreferred operation fits the criteria for an Unexpected Trigger reception – as it does not match a valid trigger for the current state.

    It may be that once a behavioral feature is referred to on any of the PSM states, then it loses it's potentiality to be an unreferred to operation. If that is so, it should be made much clearer.

    But it is still not very useful. Imagine a protocol state machine with many states. Now imagine an operation that can be called while the psm is any of these states (with no precondition, post-condition, or state change). This would allow the PSM not to mention the behavior at all. Now imagine a change that would prohibit the operation from only one state. Perhaps it's not allowed while initializing. To model this all the states would have to explicitly mention this operation, which is a unwieldy solution.

    It is also unclear about the scope. If the classifier has a) more than one PSM or b) different concurrent regions within one PSM. Is an unreferred to behavioral feature evaluated by looking at the concurrent region, or by looking at the sum of all the PSMs for the classifier

  • Reported: UML 2.5 — Mon, 15 Feb 2016 22:44 GMT
  • Updated: Tue, 16 Feb 2016 20:46 GMT