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Calling a Process

Calling a process requires that the process be identified and the manner in which the process is called.

The Child process

The child process is planned by the parent process in the context of an activity during the course of the parent process' execution. When the child process is planned, one of two events takes place. The parent process will wait for the child process to complete its execution, or the child process will plan and execute without any further interaction with the parent process.

Folio

The folio is an optional piece of data that is added to the process call which ties the processes together. This is for information purposes only and has no baring on the actual execution of the process itself.

The process call method

The call method impacts on when and how data is transferred between the parent and child process. The Synchronous method is used to wait for the child process to complete, pass data back to the parent process. If return data is not required (data can be information or a boolean indicator) the Asynchronous method can be used.

Recursive process calls 

It is permissible to call the parent process as the child process. However, this creates a recursive call of the same event. The simple danger when doing this is that the child process (which is the parent process as well), gets into an infinite loop of calling itself. This can result in many processes being instantiated. This impacts on the available system resources and may lead up to the physical machine experiencing performance issues to the point of not responding.

The designer must therefore consider why the need for a parent process to be called as a child is required and if it's necessary. Logic should be introduced into the workflow leading up to the IPC call to ensure that the logic path is not recursive calling the same parent process as a child.

 

 

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