Systems And Methods For Automatically Generating User Interface Elements For Complex Databases
Patent No. US10977220 (titled "Systems And Methods For Automatically Generating User Interface Elements For Complex Databases") was filed by Michael Philip Kaufman on Jul 13, 2018.
What is this patent about?
’220 is related to the field of data processing, specifically the automated generation of user interfaces (UIs) for relational databases. Traditionally, building UIs for databases, especially large ones, required significant manual coding. Developers had to create front-end applications that allowed users to interact with the back-end database, defining how data was displayed, edited, and related across different tables. This process was time-consuming and required close synchronization between the front-end and back-end structures.
The underlying idea behind ’220 is to automatically generate a fully functional UI for any relational database schema without requiring custom programming for each table. The system interrogates the database schema , extracting information about tables, constraints, and relationships. This information is then used to automatically construct a UI that provides standard functionalities like browsing, searching, editing, and adding data. A key aspect is the automated handling of relationships between tables, allowing users to navigate and manage related data seamlessly.
The claims of ’220 focus on a method, a system, and a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium for automatically generating a UI for a relational database. The method involves scanning the database to determine its structure, creating machine representations of the tables and relationships, and constructing a client application from these representations. The resulting application provides a connection to the database, displays for data manipulation, and mechanisms for navigating relationships between tables. Crucially, the claims emphasize that the UI construction process requires no incremental human intervention on a per-table basis.
In practice, the invention works by first analyzing the database schema to understand the tables, columns, data types, and relationships defined within the relational database management system (RDBMS). This analysis is then used to build an internal representation of the database structure. Based on this representation, the system generates a UI with different modes for interacting with the data, such as browse, search, edit, and add. The UI also includes features for navigating relationships between tables, often using a hierarchical context stack to maintain the state of different tables as users 'drill down' into related data.
The invention differentiates itself from prior approaches by automating the entire UI generation process. Existing tools often required manual coding or were limited to generating simple UIs for single tables. ’220, however, can handle complex database schemas with numerous tables and relationships, automatically creating a comprehensive UI without requiring developers to write custom code for each table. This automation significantly reduces development time and effort, making it easier to create and maintain UIs for large and complex databases. The use of a context stack for managing relationships also provides a more intuitive and user-friendly experience compared to traditional methods.
How does this patent fit in bigger picture?
Technical landscape at the time
In the early 2000s when ’220 was filed, client-server database architectures were common, at a time when front-end user interfaces were typically implemented using conventional programming languages. The development of a complete, fully-functional UI for complex database schemas often required significant manual coding, and hardware or software constraints made the automated generation of such interfaces non-trivial.
Novelty and Inventive Step
The examiner allowed the claims because they were considered novel and nonobvious in light of the prior art. The closest prior art involved evaluating a subset of data recorded in a record source and storing a context attribute value in session memory. However, the examiner stated that the prior art did not explicitly teach constructing a client application that provides display for creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting data within one or more tables, while also managing and navigating relationships between data records across related tables, without requiring incremental human intervention on a per-table basis.
Claims
This patent contains 16 claims, with claims 1, 11, and 14 being independent. The independent claims are directed to a method, a system, and a computer-readable medium for automatically generating a user interface for working with data in a relational database. The dependent claims generally elaborate on and refine the features of the independent claims.
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Date
Description
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US10977220
- Application Number
- US16034696
- Filing Date
- Jul 13, 2018
- Status
- Expired
- Expiry Date
- Feb 5, 2022
- External Links
- Slate, USPTO, Google Patents