Fig. 4

Types of process blocks. With the help of process blocks, multiple tasks that differ only in the parameter values can be created without defining all of them separately. Four different types of process blocks are implemented that fall into two general classes. Instances of the first class contain only a single variable, either (a) a value from a numerical sequence (process sequence) or (b) a path to files (process folder). In (a), subtasks are created based on an integer sequence starting at 5 and ending at 7 with an increment of 1. In (b), a subtask is created for each sh-file in the folder /etc/. Instances of the second type can contain multiple variables, either (c) instances derived from tables (process table) or (d) instances based on return values returned by previous tasks this task depends on (process input). In (c), a table with two columns named name and type and two rows is used as input for the process table. This results in two subtasks for this task, one for each row. The process input block in (d) depends on a task with id 1, which itself had two subtasks. Hence, this task returns two instances, each containing the variables file and fCount obtained from its return variables