Application procedures

For each valid operation that a object class can perform on an object instance, the OSA writer must provide some procedure to apply that operation. There are three types of application procedures (or operation execution procedures); per attribute, per object and action. Whenever any of these procedures are called, they are all passed an identically formatted data structure. Each type of execution procedure will only be concerned with select portions of the data structure passed to them. This is implemented in this manner so as to facilitate OSA writers who wish to combine execution procedures that might be similar but of different synchronization. For instance, an OSA writer may wish to combine the create and replaceWithDefault functions, or the filter and get functions. Then the execution procedure would just have to identify what it is being asked to do exactly by looking in the data structure passed to it, and ignore the portions of the data structure that are irrelevant to its operation.