Patent ID: 7434225

Claim:
A method for a parser to handle context information associated with a message flow in a messaging system, a message flow having processing nodes for processing the message, the method comprising: receiving at the parser a request to perform a first operation associated with the message; obtaining an indication of the context information to be retrived from a context store, said context information for use by at least one of the processing nodes in the message flow for determining how to process the message; retrieving the context information from the context store; and creating a logical representation of the context information in a format accessible by at least one processing node in the message flow; wherein the context information is in a format accessible by any processing node in the message flow; wherein at least a part of the message has also been parsed into a logical representation accessible by processing nodes in the message flow, the method further comprising the step of: receiving at the parser a request to perform a second operation associated with the message, the message having been processed by at least part of the message flow; and ignoring the logical representation of context information associated with the processing of said message, said logical representation of the context information co-existing with the logical representation of a least part of that message.