How to Draw a UML Association Class

An association class, which is essentially a class attached to an association, is used to model an association as a UML class. It has its own name, attributes operations, just like any other ordinary class. However, it is described by additional attributes which does not belong to the objects involved in the association. For example, an Enrollment class is added to hold the attribute year between Student class and Course class, but it does not belong to either Student class or Course class.

Let’s take the year of the enrollment of a student in a course as an example:

We have two classes Student and Course which are linked on the diagram. Draw a class diagram as follows:
Student class and Course class
Next, we create a class. Click Class from the diagram toolbar and drag it on the diagram.
Create a class
Name the newly created class as Enrollment.
Name it as Enrollment
Click Association Class from the diagram toolbar and drag it from the connector between Student class and Course class to the Enrollment class.
Create association class

You’ll then be asked if you want the association to have the same name as that of the class (e.g. Enrollment).

Synchronize Association Class Name

We’ve selected ‘No’ in our example here. However, if we had selected ‘Yes’ to synchronize the names, we would have seen something like below.

Association Name = Class Name
To add an attribute to an association class, right click on Enrollment class and select Add > Attribute from the pop-up menu.
Add an attribute
Finally, name the newly created attribute as year.
Name the newly created attribute as year