Patent ID: 7752254

Claim:
A method for propagating contexts between a first and second system, the contexts providing information about an environment within which work in the first and second systems is to be performed, the contexts having a hierarchical structure in which a lowest level context is identified as a leaf context, the method comprising: receiving, at the first system, a request to perform work; creating a context hierarchy in the first system, responsive to determining that performing the work involves a parent and at least one descendant executing at the first system, wherein: the context hierarchy provides information about the environment within which the work is to be performed in the first system; and the context hierarchy represents the parent as a root context and represents each descendant as a descendant context, the root context providing context information about the environment in which the parent will execute and each descendant context providing context information about the environment in which the descendant it represents will execute; and responsive to determining, at the first system, that a leaf descendant will request the second system to perform a portion of the work, propagating from the first system to the second system the leaf context representing the leaf descendant, wherein the leaf context representing the leaf descendant enables re-creation at the second system of the context information about the leaf descendant only.