UML Designer User's Guide


Establishing protocol conformance

The Catalog class is the implementation of the catalog, which we identified as a thing earlier in our analysis. The Catalog class, therefore, will implement the responsibilities of the catalog, which means that it will conform to the <Catalog> protocol. (For the purpose of this discussion, the class and the class design are effectively the same once we have linked them together.)

The <Catalog> protocol defines the interface of the catalog object in the system. The protocol includes message specifications that define the messages the catalog object must respond to, what types of parameters those messages require, and what types of values they return. To conform to the <Catalog> protocol, the Catalog class must implement an actual Smalltalk method for each of the messages specified in the protocol. UML Designer can automatically generate the appropriate stub implementations for these methods when protocol conformance is established.


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