To establish consistent processing and expedite creation of workflow definitions across a group of related processes, a workflow author can create workflow definitions that inherit the characteristics and properties of previously defined workflow definitions.
All workflow definitions the author creates inherit system data fields and two submaps, Terminate and Malfunction, from the workflow definition base class. In addition to inheritance from the base class, the workflow author can define common characteristics in workflow definitions at a high level in the class hierarchy and automatically pass these characteristics to subsequently derived workflow definitions. For example, a department might process several types of insurance claims that are related in many ways, but each has a few unique processing tasks. The workflow author can create a parent workflow that contains all the similar tasks and then create specialized child workflows, one for each type of claim, that inherit the shared processes from the parent workflow and contain the unique tasks each child workflow requires to complete its processing.
When a workflow is created, the author simply selects the workflow on which the new workflow will be based. The derived workflow is said to inherit the items (maps and properties) of the workflow from which it derives. If changes are made to the parent workflow, the changes are propagated to all its derived workflows. Inherited items are read-only in the derived workflow definition, but the workflow author can override any inherited item by redefining it.