One example of this invention defines a new interface to the CIM client API that is more generic than the current standard CIM client API that clients can use for the case where they want to find all relationships between instances of A and B. The method would implement several different ways to retrieve the relationships between A and B. CIM has a concept of a qualifier, which is a tag that can be applied to supply any additional information. The provider could define in the qualifier for each association class which algorithm they think is most efficient, and the implementation of the new interface would use whichever algorithm the qualifier says will be most efficient.