US Patent 7992145 Multilevel ticket-based job management architecture for computing devices

A job completion architecture, includes content that is specified as a hierarchical tree of related content units and a set of multilevel tickets associated with instances of the hierarchically arranged content units. The job manager applies the multilevel tickets, specifying property settings at potentially multiple levels within the hierarchical tree, according to a qualified inheritance rule wherein settings applicable to a set of lower level properties that are specified within a first (higher level) ticket are incorporated into the merged settings to the extent a second (lower level) ticket does not specify settings for the set of lower level properties. If a same property is specified in both a higher and lower level ticket, during merging a setting specified in the lower level ticket overrides the higher level ticket setting.