UML class diagrams

Hi, my name is Bear, and today I'll be teaching you about UML class diagrams. We'll start with some of the basic characteristics. Then we'll talk about relationships and finally we'll finish up by going through a few examples together.

All right, let's talk about some of the basic characteristics of class diagrams. To help explain these characteristics, I'm going to make up an example to help us illustrate. So let's say we're building a system for a zoo.

And keep in mind, these examples I'm going to use probably wouldn't ever find their way into an actual program, but humor me as I use these concepts to make it easier to understand. So in our zoo, we want to describe the different things that are in the system. You represent these things through classes, and a class is depicted with this shape here.

So what's in a zoo? Well, a ton of animals. So we can create a class for our animals.

To do that, you just write the name of the class in this top section. If our class is animal, an instance of that class would be a specific animal. So the question is, how would you go about identifying each instance of that class?

You do that through attributes. An attribute is a significant piece of data containing values that describe each instance of that class. They're also known as fields, variables or properties, and they go in the middle section here.

So for our animal class, we could create attributes like name, id, and age. That way we could identify a specific instance of the animal class like Ruth id number 304, age 114. These need to be formatted a certain way, though.

You'll start with visibility, which we'll talk about later. The name of the attribute, beginning with a lowercase letter. Then you follow it with a colon and the data type for the name.

We'd want to return a string and we can format the other attributes the same way, except that we'd want to return an integer, since these are numbers. Now that we've got some attributes for our animal class, we get to the bottom section here. This is where you put methods which are also known as operations or functions.

Methods allow you to specify any behavioral features of a class. So we might ask ourselves what are some different behaviors of this animal class? Maybe we'd want to be able to change our animals names, like Ruth should actually be called Rita.

So let's create a function called setName. We can also create a method for eating since all of our animals eat. Methods also need to be formatted a certain way.

You start with visibility, which we'll talk about next. Then the method beginning with a lowercase letter. Next, you put parentheses to signify the function you're going to program later.

You can also add variables and the data type in here, but in most cases it's not really necessary. We'll add visibility in parentheses to the eat method as well. Now let's talk about visibility.

The visibility of an attribute or method sets the accessibility for that attribute or method. So right now we have a minus sign for all of these, which indicates that each of these attributes and methods are private. They can't be accessed by any other class or subclass.

The exact opposite is the plus sign, which means an attribute or method is public and can be accessed by any other class. Another visibility type is indicated by the hash, which means an attribute or method is protected. These can only be accessed by the same class or its subclasses.

And finally there's the tilde or the squiggly, as I like to call it. This sets the visibility to package or default, which means it can be used by any other class as long it’s in the same package. But that one is rarely ever used.

In most cases, your attributes are going to be private or protected, and methods are often public. Let's quickly review these basics with another example. Let's make a class for employee.

We could give an employee attributes like name, employee ID, phone number and department. We'll want all of these attributes to be private and we could create a simple method like updating a phone number which we'll go ahead and set to public. So you might have noticed that I'm using a diagraming application to create these UML class diagrams.

The same principles apply if you're using pen and paper. But a diagraming software makes it much easier. The diagraming application that I'm using today is Lucidchart.

You can sign up for a free account with your email address and then you'll be able to follow along as we make these class diagrams together. So the next thing we'll need to cover are the different relationships that exist between classes. The first type of relationship that we'll describe is inheritance.

And I'm going to keep going with the zoo example because it makes it easy to understand the logic of these relationships. We'll get to a more technical real world example just a little later. Okay.

So inheritance, let's say, in our zoo, the only animals we have are tortoises, otters and the lesser known but nonetheless amazing slow loris. In our system, we want to distinguish each of them as their own class. So we'll make three classes for a tortoise, otter, and slow loris.

Now, instead of duplicating attributes for name, id and age, we can make these classes into subclasses of the animal class by drawing open arrows like this. This is an inheritance relationship. We're saying that these subclasses inherit all the attributes and methods of the superclass.

You could also use the terms child and parent class. So our order class is going to inherit the attributes of name, age and ID. And then we could also add an attribute specific to the otter like whisker length.

One of the advantages of inheritance is that if we wanted to change or add an attribute for all animals, we wouldn't have to go in and make that change to tortoise and then otter and then slow loris. We just make the change to the animal class and it applies across all of its subclasses. in this scenario, we also have what's called abstraction.

Animal is an abstract class because in our system, any time we want to instantiate one of our classes, it's going to be a tortoise, otter, or slow loris. We wouldn't instantiate the animal class itself. The animal class is just a way to simplify things and keep the code dry so you don't repeat yourself.

So to show that this is an abstract class, we'll put the name in italics. You could put the class name inside these things as well, but I prefer italics. Okay.

Another type of relationship is association. So if we had a class for sea urchin, we could draw an association which is just depicted by a simple line between otter and sea urchin. And we could say otter eats sea urchin.

There's no dependency between them. It's just a basic association relationship, and it's pretty simple. The next type of relationship is aggregation.

It's a special type of association that specifies a whole and its parts. So to continue with our zoo example, again, this is just to help explain the logic. Let's create a new class for a group of tortoises.

A group of tortoises is called a creep. So here's our creep class and it's got a relationship with tortoise. Any of our zoo's tortoises could be part of a creep, but they don't have to be.

A tortoise could leave the group at any point and still exist on its own. That type of relationship where a part can exist outside the whole is aggregation, and we note it with an open diamond. There's also a relationship where the part can't exist outside the whole.

That's called composition. To illustrate this, I'm going to create a few new classes. Let's just say we have several different visitor centers in our zoo, and each of those visitor centers has a lobby and a bathroom.

Now, if one of our visitor centers was torn down, the lobby and the bathroom of that visitor center would also be destroyed. Those rooms couldn't exist apart from the visitor center that is contained in. That’s composition.

When a child object wouldn't be able to exist without its parent object. We note a composition relationship with a closed diamond. Another important concept when we talk about relationships in UML is multiplicity.

Multiplicity allows you to set numerical constraints on your relationships. For example, let's say we want to specify that our visitor centers are going to have just one lobby. We simply write the number one here, meaning there can be one and only one lobby per visitor center.

But for bathrooms, maybe we want to make it so that there's at least one bathroom per visitor center. But leave the option to have as many as you'd like. We'd use this notation to denote one or many bathrooms.

Other types of multiplicity are 0 to 1, which is an optional relationship. N representing the specific amount, which in our example was one, but it could be any other number depending on your use case. Zero to many.

One to many. Or a specific range. Hopefully our zoo examples have helped explain those concepts.

But I want to show you what a real world example would look like. This is a UML class diagram for an online shopping cart. And if you want to look at the diagram with me, just click the link.

In the top right corner, you can see that this system has several classes and relationships. So let's walk through a couple of them. We'll start with the user class.

It's got attributes for user ID, password, login status and register date. You've got the different return types on the right and on the left. The visibility which is set to private.

You can see how the values returned by those attributes would specifically describe an instance of the user class. Down below we have a public method of verify log in returning a boolean and this makes sense. Right?

Methods are behaviors of a class. So if you were to log into your user account, there's a function in place that verifies your login credentials. Let's move on to the customer class.

This arrow tells us that customer is a child of user, so customer inherits all the attributes and methods of the user class. And same thing for the administrator class. Both of these inherit from user, but also have their own specific attributes and methods like administrator can update the catalog, but the customer can't.

Stemming from customer, there are also several lines with the closed end diamond. So if you recall, these are composition relationships which mean that the parts cannot exist without the whole. in the instance of the customer class, if that customer’s account was destroyed, his shopping cart would be destroyed as well and all of his orders would be lost.

They can't exist outside of the customer. The same applies for the shipping info and order details. If there's no order, there's not going to be any order details or shipping info.

The last thing we'll look at in this example is multiplicity. You can see that a customer can have zero or many orders. Makes sense, right?

You could create a customer account for an online store but never buy anything. Or you could be a frequent customer and place several different orders. And then on the flip side, an order can belong to only one customer.

It'd be pretty confusing if a specific order with a unique order ID was duplicated across several different customers. And here you can see a 1 to 1 relationship. Each order has one and only one order details and order details belongs to one and only one order.

Okay, that wraps up our tutorial for UML class diagrams. If you're interested in learning more about diagraming, processes, systems and organizations, visit training. lucid.

co I hope to see you there.