When a DO is assigned to a container, it is called a child of this container. This holds also when the container is the result of a design-pattern, and for DO's which are result of the pattern's composition description, there is no special handling which might be of interest - the child is appended to the previously added child, and that's all.

Sometimes this behavior is a little bit unhandy. Image the task that all children of a pattern named <emphasizedStuff> should be emphasized. For DO's which are produced in the composition this could be realized as in the following example:

pattern emphasizedStuff:
{
  <em>
    <textHandlerObj data="This text would be emphasized."/>
  </em>
}

But what if there are DO's which are added to the container after the pattern's composition has been finished ? These would appended after the emphasized block, and thus they would not be emphasized. What is needed here is a means to redirect such objects to the emphasized block. In DCL, this can be realized using an element called children. A small change in the upper example is enough to implement the demanded redirection:

pattern emphasizedStuff:
{
  <em>
    <textHandlerObj data="This text would be emphasized."/>
    <children/>
  </em>
}

Now all DO's added after the pattern composition will be inserted into the emphasized block.