Summary.

Details about Domain Classes

  • Attribute
    • Describes one piece of info about each instance of the class
  • Identifier or key
    • One attribute uniquely identifies an instance of the class. Required for data entities, optional for domain classes. Customer ID identifies a customer (E.g, broncoID)
  • Compound attribute
    • Two or more attributes combined into one structure to simplify the model (e.g, address rather than number, street, city, etc.). Sometimes an identifier or key is a compound attribute (1 attribute)
      • 5 text boxes for address instead of 1 compound address text box
      • Instead of having a sectionID key as a foreign key when linking a Course class with Section class, we can eliminate that sectionID in place of a compound key that uses the CourseID column with the SectionNum column to make a unique identifier for each row.

Association Among Things

  • Association
    • A naturally occurring relationship between classes (UML term)## Types of Associations
    • Binary Association
      • Associations between exactly two different classes
    • Unary Association (recursive)
    • Ternary Association (three)
    • N-ary Association (between n)