Recipes are potentially complex entities. A recipe may contain (possibly nested) references to sub-recipes and it may be used for several products. The internal composition and interpretation of recipes – including the referencing of sub-recipes – is outside the scope of this specification.

Recipes are typically created and managed centrally, then rolled out to production, usually together with the information, what product(s) the recipe is to be used for, as it would not be practical to add this locally on every system.

Recipes may also be created and/or edited locally. So a local system may have additional recipes not known externally and different versions of recipes than those existing externally. This may or may not be known to the recipe management and thus to the client.

A recipe may be used for several products. Also, there may be several recipes for the same product, be it different versions of the recipe or different sub-sections of the complete recipe or different complete recipes that may be used under different circumstances.