Concept: Attachment (SoaML)
A part of a Message that is attached to rather than contained in the message.
Relationships
Main Description

Usage:  "Attachment" stereotypes UML Property

An Attachment denotes some component of a message that is an attachment to it (as opposed to a direct part of the message itself). In general this is not likely to be used greatly in higher level design activities, but for many processes attached data is important to differentiate from embedded message data. For example, a catalog service may return general product details as a part of the structured message but images as attachments to the message; this also allows us to denote that the encoding of the images is binary (as opposed to the textual encoding of the main message). Attachments can be used to indicate part of service data that can be separately accessed, reducing the data sent between consumers and providers unless it is needed.

A real-world example would be all of those advertisements that fall out of your telephone statement - they are attached to the message (in the same envelope) but not part of the statement.

The figure shows an InvoiceContent Attachment to the Invoice MessageType.  The attachment contains the detailed information about the invoice.

                                                              



 

More Information