Learning UML

Chapter 10. The Object Constraint Language

This chapter introduces the UML’s Object Constraint Language (OCL), a sublanguage of the UML that allows for capturing constraints or rules and attaching them to model elements, which then must satisfy the constraints for the model to be considered correct (also known as well formed). I discuss how to express rules as expressions and how to attach those rules to model elements as properties. As the OCL is a complete language in its own right, this chapter does not discuss every aspect of the OCL, as that would require a whole different book. Instead, this chapter focuses on simply introducing you to the OCL. For further information beyond this chapter, please see Appendix A for references to notable resources on the World Wide Web and various books that further discuss the OCL.

For example of how the OCL might be used, recall that in Chapter 9 I discussed how a model is erroneous if a project’s start date succeeds its end date. I pointed out that a project’s start date must precede its end date. In Chapter 9, I captured this and other rules using natural human language, but we can use the OCL to more formally capture such rules. Capturing such rules more formally is valuable, because we can begin to automate the checking of the correctness of UML models.

Expressions

As discussed in Chapter 9, a property is a characteristic of a model element shown as part of a comma-delimited list of text strings inside a pair of braces ({}) after or below ...