External Entity - modelint/shlaer-mellor-metamodel GitHub Wiki

An External Entity (EE) represents some Class that interfaces implicitly, explicitly or both with an external Domain.

In doing so, an EE has access to the identity of any given instance of the represented class. So any Operation invoked on an EE by the represented Class need not supply identifier values as explicit parameter values.

Historically, there have been various approaches to defining and using External Entities. For example, [MB] describes the approach of defining an interface as a proxy for another Domain or portion of a Domain.

Our approach is to define each External Entity as a proxy for a Class in the same Domain. The approach is described in detail in [EE].

Key benefits of this approach is the support of implicit bridging, conditional EE inclusion during debugging, and eliminating the need for domain operations. See the referenced document for more details on these features.

Identifiers

1. Name + Domain

Attributes

Name

The name is typically a shorter, capitalized version of the represented Class.

Type: External Entity Name, based on Name