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I have these classes: IdCard, Note, Ingredient, Ceo, ProblemOccured, Chief.

In my opinion IdCard, Note, Ingredient and ProblemOccured are <<Boundary>> classes since they interact with the people.

But Ceo and Chief are <<Entity>> classes.

My friend disagrees with my understanding and I would appreciate if anyone helps.

Christophe
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R AND B
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  • What are those colons in the names? Further: what are _types of classes_? – qwerty_so Nov 18 '19 at 17:07
  • Colons are used to specify classes in UML, and type of classes are stereotypes for classes, which are used to create robustness within the classes – R AND B Nov 18 '19 at 17:57
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    Sorry, but that statement about colons is nonsense. Where did you get that from? When showing objects you use a `:` notation. But you seem to apply the colons randomly. – qwerty_so Nov 18 '19 at 18:50
  • Sorry, but you can see in books (e.g Object-Oriented Systems Analysis and Design using UML 3rd edition ) it is written like that. The thing that you mention is about instantiating the class. Thank you. – R AND B Nov 18 '19 at 19:43
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    @John MIchael: The name of a class is a plain name string without any colon. You are probably confusing the notation for anonymous objects (e.g., `:Ingredient`) with the notation for classes (`Ingedrient`). – Gerd Wagner Nov 18 '19 at 22:10
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    @John MIchael: Your question can only be answered if you provide an elaborate description of the purpose of each of your classes. Otherwise it will have to be closed. You may find an anser to your question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/683825/in-uml-class-diagrams-what-are-boundary-classes-control-classes-and-entity-cl#17028825 – Gerd Wagner Nov 18 '19 at 22:23

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Preliminary note

First of all, class names are always without :. The notation :CLASS is used in class diagrams, when a class name is used as type of a property. It is also often used, even without object/property name, for life-line in sequence diagram. The : means then an anonymous instance of class CLASS.

The classes to be analyzed are then: ID CARD, NOTES, IGREDIENT, CEO, PROBLEM OCCURED, CHIEF.

Some context

The Entity-Control-Boundary analysis pattern is based on use-cases. Without the corresponding use-cases, you cannot distinguish for sure between boundaries and entities. But we can make some assumptions:

  • CEO, CHIEF and NOTES are apparently classes for long-lived objects.
  • PROBLEM OCCURED could be a user-interface class to report an application problem. In this case it would be a boundary class. But it could as well be a problem that is reported by the chief to the ceo, which would make it an entity class.
  • ID CARD could refer to an UI component to display the ID of an entity-person. In this case it would be a boundary class. But it could as well refer to an identity card, that contains all the informations of the identity document that is registererd in the application as entity.
  • IGREDIENT: is it a typo of INGREDIENT (could be an entity, e.g. if it's an application and CHIEFs were in fact cooks) ? Is the starting I an I for "interface" (would be a boundary, but what is a GREDIENT) ?
Christophe
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  • Good guessing, but only that, unfortunately. The OP needs to give the missing details as commented by Gerd Wagner. – qwerty_so Nov 18 '19 at 22:42
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    @qwerty_so Thanks. Indeed. This is why I reminded the context of ECB and showed that classes the OP saw as boundary could indeed be but could also be the entity. So, this is in fact an invitation for OP to look more critically at his own assumptions. It's like a real-life maintenance project when you inherit a system with a couple of diagrams and have to figure it out: you go on iteratively, making some guesses at start, and check against the facts, and then revise your assumptions, and so on, until you got it ;-) – Christophe Nov 19 '19 at 07:57
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    `IGREDIENT`: is it a typo of `INGREDIENT` damn that was good – Abraham Mar 13 '22 at 06:30
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    @abranhe thanks: I couldn’t resist ;-). I see that the question was edited by several people and someone removed the typo, and even the colon on which OP was insisting in the comments. – Christophe Mar 13 '22 at 09:39