UML Designer User's Guide

Retrieving protocols

For a class design that has a real implementing class, you can retrieve one or more protocols. (You can also do this automatically while retrieving classes.) You can retrieve a single protocol specifying all the methods of the class, or multiple protocols, each specifying the methods in a particular category.

When you retrieve a protocol from a class design, UML Designer creates a new Protocol element containing a message specification for each of the class design's methods. It also creates a traceability link between the protocol and the conforming class design. You can also select methods for retrieval by category; this is useful if you want to retrieve only some of the methods, or if you want to retrieve the methods into several distinct protocols. UML Designer creates conformance links between the class design and all of the protocols to which it conforms.

When you retrieve a protocol, UML Designer attempts to assign types to the generated message parameters based on the names given to the parameters in the Smalltalk code, if a matching protocol exists in the model or a prerequisite model. For example, a method parameter called aString would result in a protocol message parameter of type <String>.


[ Top of Page | Previous Page | Next Page | Table of Contents | Index ]