• Hard Associations are automatic associations that are normally made as you perform actions within Web Switching Management or perform actions from the Control Tool that are recorded into the switching sheet. An event can only have one hard association to a switching sheet. Hard associations cannot be broken once the association has been established; however, the association can be moved to a new switching sheet if the steps that created the event are moved.

• Soft Associations are associations that are normally added manually from the Events List in Web Switching Management. An event can be softly associated to an unlimited number of switching sheets. This type of association can be manually removed up until the associated switching sheet has reached the Completed state.

• Master is the relationship type made between a Planned switching sheet and its active master switching event. There can only be one Master Event associated to any single switching sheet.

• Canceled is the relationship type made between a Planned switching sheet and a canceled master switching event. There can be any number of Canceled event associations to a single switching sheet. These Canceled events were originally classified as Master Events for the plan.

• Planned is the relationship type made between a Planned switching sheet and a planned outage. A planned outage is an outage that was generated from a planned switching sheet after the completion of an action recorded in the Steps section of the plan.

• Forced is the relationship type made between an Emergency switching sheet and an unplanned outage or non-outage event. A Forced relationship will be made when recording real-time actions into an Emergency switching sheet. The relationship can also be made when creating an Emergency plan for an event from the Work Agenda Events List or the event's Event Details display.

• Manual is the relationship type made between a switching sheet and a manually associated event. Manual associations are also made between plans if an outage is hard associated to one plan and the outage is restored with another switching sheet. The plan that recorded the restoration step will have the event automatically associated to it with a classification type of Manual. Grouped events can also cause switching sheets to be manually associated. Partially restoring an outage or adding customers to an outage will create a manual association between the switching sheet and the event, if no association (hard or soft) already exists.

• If an event with no hard association consumes another event with no hard association, then the resulting event will have no hard association, and its manual associations will be a combined list of both events' manual associations.

• If an event with a hard association consumes an event with no hard association, then the resulting event will have the surviving event's hard association and a combined list of both events' manual associations.

• If an event with no hard association consumes an event with a hard association, then the resulting event will have the consumed event's hard association and a combined list of both events' manual associations.

• If an event with a hard association consumes another event with a hard association, then the resulting event will have the surviving event's hard association. The consumed event's hard association will be listed as a manual association along with the combined list of both events' manual associations.

• If an event consumes another event with an association to the same switching sheet, then the above rules will apply, but the plan will only be listed once in the event's association list. An event can only have one association to a specific switching sheet.