In standards, such as the Object Management Group Inc. CORBA standard, a context is defined, for inclusion with an inter-process flow, which comprises a standard section and a free format, provider specific, section. An object identifier to identify the target of a request is added to the free format section of the request context and/or the free format section of the reply context that results from the request. This enables the server that receives the request and/or the client that receives the response to deduce that the content of free format section was added to the context by the process from which the flow was received. Further enhancement is obtained by adding a reply/request indicator to indicate the direction of the flow for which the free format section was built, and level identifier information to identify the product id and version number of the product that built the context.