Artifacts and Manifestations

An artifact represents a physical piece of information, such as a model, a file, or a table, that is used or produced by a software development process.

Figure 9-7 shows three example artifacts. One is represented using a userdefined icon, and the other two are shown as stereotyped classes.

Figure 9-7: Artifacts

An artifact can also contain other artifacts as part of a composition relationship (see the section "Aggregation" in Chapter 2).

A manifestation represents the concrete physical realization of one or more elements of a model by an artifact.

Figure 9-8 shows that the Order class is manifested by the Order.jar Java file from Figure 9-7.

Figure 9-8: Manifestation

Manifestation is a form of abstraction dependency; see the section "Abstraction Dependencies" in Chapter 2.

The following built-in stereotypes may prove useful in helping you define artifacts:

• The ‚ «document ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact contains useful information about the system being modeled . This information isn't part of any of the models themselves , and it doesn't take the form of source code (see the description of ‚ «source ‚ » later in this list) or an executable file (see the description of ‚ «executable ‚ » later in this list).

• The ‚ «executable ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact is a piece of executable software.

• The ‚ «file ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact is a physical file.

• The ‚ «library ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact contains a static or dynamic object library (for instance, a Windows Dynamic Link Library [DLL]).

• The ‚ «script ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact is a script file that can be interpreted by a system.

• The ‚ «source ‚ » stereotype signifies that the artifact contains source code.