There are two ways to customize contexts: using external definitions and using code. During the analysis and design phases of creating an application, you determine which contexts the application will use, which ones you should define externally and which ones you should create using code, and which contexts different processes can share. Typically, you use external definitions to create general, upper-level contexts such as the system context or workstation context. For lower level contexts, you typically use code to create contexts as they are needed such as creating a customer session context when a user performs business operations on an account.

The following sections describe how to define contexts or create them using code.