UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language, Second Edition

Operations

Operations are the processes that a class knows to carry out.

Operations most obviously correspond to the methods on a class. At the specification level, operations correspond to public methods on a type. Normally, you don't show those operations that simply manipulate attributes, because they can usually be inferred. You may need to indicate, however, whether a given attribute is read-only or frozen (that is, its value never changes). In the implementation model, you may want to show private and protected operations, as well.

The full UML syntax for operations is

visibility name (parameter-list) : return-type-expression {property-string}

where

• visibility is + (public), # (protected), or − (private)

• name is a string

• parameter-list contains ...