Chapter 1-4: Understanding Process Design

Process Genealogy

A simple genealogical metaphor describes the relationships between and among processes. For example, a parent is a process that invokes one or more child processes. In APPX, a child is associated with only a single parent (that is, the process that invoked it) at each invocation occurrence. But the same process can be invoked by more than one process in the same application and, thus, may have several parents. Two processes with the same parent are sibling processes. Ancestor processes include the parent process and any grandparent processes. Descendent processes include any child and grandchild processes (and so forth). All these relationships can be clearly depicted with diagrams that resemble a family tree. The term process family is applied to a parent and all its descendents.

Any or all of these family-related terms can be applied to any APPX process (menu, input, output, etc.), depending on its relationship in the context of an application. For example, a menu process can be the parent of several children (all the processes that correspond to the options on the menu), one of which is a job process. This job process can be the parent of a query and output process. The same menu described previously as a parent can also be the child of a previous process such as another menu.

APPX Application Design Manual (01/13/03)

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