Designing the Procedure Logic › Types of Procedures

Types of Procedures

In analysis, processes describe business requirements. During design, you describe the method by which each elementary process is carried out in procedures.

Note: For more information about the elementary processes, see the Analysis Guide.

The important point to recall for design is that elementary processes are the objects for which Process Action Diagrams are built.

All activities are described in procedures and components of procedures.

A procedure is a precise set of instructions that facilitates the completion of one or more specific processes.

All procedures support the execution of elementary processes in some way. However, you may consider them in two broad categories based on their level of support:

• Process-implementing procedures-These procedures directly implement elementary processes defined during analysis. For example, the designer may directly implement an elementary process that describes the adding of an order using the online procedure Take Order. Process-implementing procedures generally USE process action blocks.
• Designer-added procedures-These procedures are implementation-specific activities that improve or simplify some characteristics of the overall implementation. For instance, you might add a menu procedure to allow users to select between multiple process-implementing procedures.

Some designer-added procedures are specified during design. However, the majority of procedures defined are process-implementing procedures.

Another way to categorize procedures held as a property in the CA Gen design model:

• Online procedures with display—These procedures execute (directly or indirectly) through one or more display interactions with the user.
• Online procedures without display—These procedures execute indirectly without interaction with the user.
• Batch procedures—These procedures execute under the control of the operating system with no interaction with the user, for instance, as a batch job under JES in an MVS environment.

  CA Gen provides 100 percent code generation for most batch processing needs. It supports, but does not generate code for, sequential file processing or report creation.

Note: Sequential file access can be accomplished through external action blocks, and the reports are generated either through a user-written program, a separate reporting package.