If you are certain that a component will not be rendered invalid by the processing which an application performs (for instance the addition of a constant to the data component would leave the axis, quality and variance components valid), then propagation of these components can be specified by listing them in the CLIST argument to NDF_PROP, thus:
CALL NDF_PROP( INDF1, 'Axis,Qual,Var', 'OUT', INDF2, STATUS )
These components would then be copied to the output NDF and would not need to be explicitly considered again by the application.