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I have stumbled across this term many times but I fail to understand the meaning of it. When I read "association end" I tend to think about the classes of an association. Is it true that every association has 2 association ends or do we mean the role of classes when we say "association end" ? I have searched for a more detailed explanation of this term but everything I've found was on uml-diagrams.org:

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You can see at the bottom of my screenshot that query and qbuilder, the roles of each class, are the "association ends". My question is if through "association end" we point at the roles of each class, or at the class itself.

David
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    Basically you answered yourself. The lower diagram shows Q-Builder owning a property query of type Query. Simple as that. – qwerty_so May 22 '21 at 11:38
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    See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47773220/what-does-the-dot-mean-at-the-end-of-an-association/47774920 and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43012322/what-is-navigability-in-uml-diagrams – qwerty_so May 22 '21 at 11:41

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Every binary association has two association ends. But n-ary associations have n ends.

The association end means the connection of the association with one of the class it associates, i.e. how both are related.

The association end is related to several concepts:

  • ownership of the end (see dot notation)
  • navigability
  • multiplicity
  • role

So you cannot say that the association end is the role, because this would ignore the other elements.

Christophe
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