Stereotypes inheriting from other Element Types
Element type inheritance
In V2.1, all relationships between all kinds of connectors had to be explicit.
For models with small numbers of stereotypes, this was fine. But when we start to add lots of stereotypes, things get more complicated. What if now want to have 3 kinds of Actor: Important, Normal, Other, as well as 2 kinds of Requirement: Functional and non-Functional?
Model Expert required that the Reference Model for this looked like this:
(name of the connector type has been missed out)
This is now very complex. And if we added a new kind of relationship between Actor and Requirement, that would have to be replicated all through the stereotypes. This isn’t good modelling.
As the stereotypes are stereotypes of their ‘parent’, we could model this as:
So the sub-types inherit EVERYTHING about the parent: including what they are related to.
So, in a future version of Model Expert, we propose to implement this implicit inheritance (without the need to draw the ‘generalization’ in the Ref Model)
- Stereotypes will inherit the connectors of their parent (un-stereotyped meta-type, if there is one) so the links will not be needed. The above model could then be drawn more simply as:
- The ‘Generalization’ connectors are needed, because it’s not always the case that stereotypes inherit from their parent. For example, in the Archimate language, most types are stereotypes of ‘Class’, and don’t share any common relationships.
- Attributes are inherited, and the user interface tries to show you which are inherited, and which are defined by this element type.
For implementation of this feature, WATCH THIS SPACE…