No Understanding of Dependents or Precedents

The Dependency Manager intentionally does not maintain any records of all known dependents or precedents in the system, as to do so would:

• duplicate data held elsewhere in the system; and
• become a bottleneck during processing, potentially leading to concurrency issues when the system becomes aware of new data used as precedents in calculations.

Rather, the Dependency Manager only records information about dependencies. Each dependency is merely a link between a particular dependent and a particular precedent. If a particular dependent has no precedents, or vice versa, then there will simply be no dependency records stored for it.

The Dependency Manager does not "understand" the dependent and precedent information stored in a dependency record; instead, each type of dependent and each type of precedent has a "handler" registered with the Dependency Manager, and the Dependency Manager calls upon these handlers to perform business-specific processing appropriate to the type, e.g. to decode a precedent or dependent into a human-readable description, or to recalculate a dependent when required.