Specifying details for your association

Association is a very comment relationship between classifiers. The association is not a simple connector, it carry lots of information related to the relationships between classifiers. Those information may/may not presented on diagram, but they are vital to the definition of your models. In Visual Paradigm there are several ways to define the details for your association and in this article we will show you one by one.

Method 1: via association’s specification dialog

The most simply way to enter the details of the association is via the specification dialog. You can right click on the association in diagram and select Open Specification from popup menu to open the specification dialog and enter the details in there. The most popular properties such as Multiplicity and Navigable are immediately available in the specification dialog.

Specify details in association’s specification dialog

For other properties such as aggregation kind can be specified by pressing the … button next to the related association end.

Open association end’s specification dialog

Method 2: via Popup menu

The association details can also being specified directly from popup menu. The association on the diagram do split into zones to detect the right click actions.

Detection zone for association’s popup menu

When you right click on the section which is close to the class then the properties specific to the association end will be showing, and you can specify the properties directly from there.

Specify association details directly form popup menu

Method 3: double click on association end

Besides the above methods, you can also double click on the association which is close to the class to trigger the quick edit pane. You can then specify the details of the association end in there. The name of the property you editing will be show on the bottom left of the pane.

Quick edit the association end’s details