Chapter 4 Managing Profiles
An extended collection is used to define an additional link between a selected metaclass or stereotype, and another metaclass or stereotyped metaclass.
In the PowerDesigner metamodel, associations between classes represent metaclass collections. Creating an extended collection is equivalent to drawing an additional association between metaclasses in the metamodel. This feature is useful when you want to create additional collections on existing metaclasses, it can also help you manage new kinds of objects like extended objects or extended links. For example, to attach documents containing use case specifications to the different packages of a model you can create an extended collection in the package metaclass and define FileObject as the target metaclass.
You can also use extended collections to complement the definition of an object using other objects: for example, you can create an extended collection on the process metaclass that shows the OOM components used as resources to the process, this allows you to have a more accurate vision of the physical implementation of the process.
For more information on the PowerDesigner metamodel, see the "PowerDesigner Public Metamodel" chapter.
When you define an extended collection you have to select a metaclass or stereotype where to create it, in this section we shall call it the parent metaclass. You also have to define a target metaclass or stereotyped metaclass. This target metaclass is displayed like a new list of objects in the property sheet of the parent metaclass. Inversely, the parent metaclass is displayed in the Dependencies tab of the target metaclass.
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