Property annotation

A property may be abstract or concrete. A concrete property is generated into two kinds of elements in Java: a field to hold the data and its associated getters/setters. However an abstract one has only the abstract accessors.

There are two categories of property tags:

• Property tags, which contains all UML data
• Member tags, which is used only to mark the membership of the property.

When you delete a property from class diagram, all methods marked by Member tags for this property will be deleted as well.

The property tags will be stored in the corresponding Java Field if the property is concrete. Others accessors will be marked as members of the property by the member tags, which has only the name attribute. For example, we have a property “ age” with “ persistence” stereotype in a class Person,

The generated codes are following:

public class Person
{
	/**
	 * @uml.property name="age"
	 * @uml.stereotype uml_id="database::persistance"
	 */
	private int age;

	/**
	 * @uml.property name="age"
	 */
	public int getAge() {
		return age;
	}

	/**
	 * @uml.property name="age"
	 */
	public void setAge(int age) {
		this.age = age;
	}
}

The bold black tags are Property tags and the bold blue UML tags are Member tags.

If the property is abstract, the Property tags will be stored in the getter and all accessors are abstract methods. Using the same example above, the abstract property “age” will be generated as following:

public abstract class Person
{
	/**
	 * @uml.property name="age"
	 * @uml.stereotype uml_id="database::persistance"
	 */
	public abstract int getAge();

	/**
	 * @uml.property name="age"
	 */
	public abstract void setAge(int age);
}

Once the accessors are generated, it is possible that users want to change them. To prevent the overriding by the forward code generation, users can use the directive tags by inserting the attribute bodyGenerated = false. For example, if users want add the change notification notify(“age”)in the setter setAge(), the complete code will be:

/**
 * @uml.property name = "age"
 * @uml bodyGenerated = "false"
 */
public void setAge(int age)
{
	this.age = age
	notify(“age”);
}

The comment of the property is retrieved from and stored in its primary member. Only the user comments and annotations in the primary member of the property are preserved during the property edition.

@uml.property (1)