Chapter 4 Managing Profiles

Defining a Stereotype

Stereotypes are used to classify instances and gather extensions for a metaclass supporting the concept of stereotype.

Stereotypes can also be used to create a metaclass within a selected metaclass, in this section we call them metaclass stereotypes. This mechanism turns the stereotype into a new metaclass with a specific list and Browser category.

For more information, see the "Defining a stereotype as a metaclass" section.

You can define several stereotypes for a given metaclass. The stereotypes you create can be applied to any instance of the metaclass. However, the extensions defined in a stereotype only apply to the instances on which the stereotype is applied. This is the reason why using stereotypes is considered as a per-instance extension mechanism.

Inheritance

Stereotypes support inheritance: characteristics of the parent of a stereotype are inherited by the child stereotypes.