Should I put actors in the Domain-Model/Class-Diagram?

Posted by devoured elysium on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by devoured elysium
Published on 2010-06-05T02:24:05Z Indexed on 2010/06/05 11:02 UTC
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When designing both the domain-model and class-diagrams I am having some trouble understanding what to put in them.

I'll give an example of what I mean:

I am doing a vacations scheduler program, that has an Administrator and End-Users. The Administrator does a couple of things like registering End-Users in the program, changing their previleges, etc. The End-User can choose his vacations days, etc.

I initially defined an Administrator and End-User as concepts in the domain-model, and later as classes in the class-diagram. In the class-diagram, both classes ended up having a couple of methods like

Administrator.RegisterNewUser();
Administrator.UnregisterUser(int id);

etc.

Only after some time I realised that actually both Administrator and End-User are actors, and maybe I got this design totally wrong. Instead of filling Administrator and End-User classes with methods to do what my Use-Cases request, I could define other classes from the domain to do them, and have controllers handle the Use-Cases(actually, I decided to do one for each Use-Case). I could have a UserDatabase.RegisterNewUser() and UserDatabase.UnregisterUser(int id);, for example, instead of having those methods on the Administrator class.

The idea would be to try to think of the whole vacation-scheduler as a "closed-program" that has a set of features and doesn't bother with things such as authentication, that should be internal/protected, being that the only public things I'd let the outside world see would be its controllers.

Is this the right approach? Or am I getting this totally wrong? Is it generally bad idea to put Actors in the domain-model/class-diagrams? What are good rules of thumb for this?

My lecturer is following Applying UML and Patterns, which I find awful, so I'd like to know where I could look up more info on this described actor-models situation.

I'm still a bit confused about all of this, as this new approach is radically different from anything I've done before.

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