About Associations

An association describes a relationship between two or more managed resources, for example a computer and the system disk it contains. This relationship is described in an association class, a special type of class that contains an association qualifier.

An association class also contains two or more references to the CIM instances representing its managed resources. A reference is a special property type that is declared with the REF keyword, indicating that it is a pointer to other instances. A reference defines the role each managed resource plays in an association.

The following figure shows two classes, Teacher and Student. Both classes are linked by the association, TeacherStudent. The TeacherStudent association has two references: Teaches, a property that refers to instances of the Teacher class and TaughtBy, a property that refers to instances of the Student class.

Figure 4–1 An Association Between Teacher and Student

You must delete an association before deleting one of its references. You can add or change the association between two or more objects without affecting the objects.