primary and secondary actor in this Scheduled task? UML

0
votes

I know that scheduled tasks representation in UML has been already asked here , here and here
But my case is different, I'm making an application for a university to automate the candidatures processing (i.e. automatically reject incomplete candidatures) I have a daily scheduled task that run every day to check whether there is new candidatures or not, here's how it works (briefly) :

  1. The scheduled task starts and check if there is any new candidature in the database.

  2. if there is, for each candidature, the application retrieve all the candidature attachments in the ftp server and checks their validity, if something is wrong an email and in-app notification is sent to the candidate to tell him what's the problem.

  3. at the end of the process if any valid candidature is found, an email + in-app notification will be sent to the guy who's responsible of validating the candidatures.

The problem I'm facing is that I don't know how to represent this in use case/sequence diagram:

  1. should I consider the system timer as the primary actor and the ftp server and the database as secondary actors? should the candidate and the responsible be considered as secondary actors too?
    Or

  2. should I consider the the responsible as the primary actor and the others as secondary actors ? since the main beneficiary of this operation (much lesser work for him)
    Or

  3. Consider that the action has no primary actor and all the actors are secondary?

Or what and why ?

Thank you

1
uml
Well, first of all you need to name the use case you are talking about. What is it's goal? There must always be a primary actor, else it would not be a use case. – qwerty_so
actually it is an automatic process that do what I described above, shouldn't it be represented as use case? the goal is to avoid the responsible of recruitment to verify ineligible or invalid candidature – hereForLearing
Why are you even specifying email or FTP in the use case? Why not defer how to meet the requirements until design? – Jim L.
I didn't understand what you mean, what you suggest please? – hereForLearing
You typically say things like the "student submits candidature", "the system checks validity", "when problematic, the system notifies the candidate", ... – Jim L.

1 Answers

2
votes

Rather than system timer I would call it Scheduler and make this the primary actor. Candidate and the responsible take part in a different use case (probably in Register for xxx).

You can show it this way:

enter image description here

The <<use>> stereotyped can be used (pun intended) to show that the connected actors are secondary ones.

N.B. I used different ways to represent that. Another way was to use a directed association for primary and undirected for secondary actors. It does not matter which notation you choose. You just need to be consistent in your model.