Actuate Corporation

Actuate Software Corporation

Nicolas C Nierenberg

Paul Rogers

William A Osberg

David B Edwards

Paul A Rogers

John R Dafoe

Methods and computer program products are disclosed for generating and viewing an electronic report having security features that allow for 'virtual bursting' of the report for multiple users. A single report having multiple pages is generated such that each or some of the pages have security tags that are compared to a security identifier list of a particular user that acts as a security clearance for that user. Through this comparison, a subset of pages from the report is formed which makes up a 'report' from the user's point of view that contains only data the user is allowed to see. This allows multiple users to view only authorized portions of a single report having page-level security determined by level breaks in the data.

Method and apparatus for generating page-level security in a computer generated report

Methods and computer program products are disclosed for generating and viewing a content listing or &ldquo;table of contents&rdquo; for a report with page-level security based in part on data breaks in the report. The content listing is derived from a content list structure containing multiple data items where a data item represents a content group. A data item is retrieved from the content list structure and contains a page range. It is then determined whether any pages in the report that the user is authorized to view are in the page range. It is then determined whether the data item should be in the content listing. In this manner, a table of contents in which data in the report viewable by a user has a corresponding content line entry in the content listing.

Method and apparatus for creating and displaying a table of content for a computer-generated report having page-level security

A method is disclosed for persistently storing in an object-oriented format various pieces of information required to display and search a report. The information is stored in a logical hierarchy including multiple 'level break' objects at a first level. Similar level break objects may be provided at a second level of the hierarchy, and at a third level, etc. Level breaks represent divisions between parallel report entities, and the level breaks at a 'first level' divide report entities which can not be further segregated into discrete groups. In general, the objects representing level breaks include general information about an entity such as the entity's name and location, or report totals associated with that entity. In the hierarchy, each level break object at the first level may reference one or more level break objects at the second level, and, in addition, may reference objects representing the visual regions (or 'frames') in which report information pertaining to the first level entity is displayed. The frame objects, in turn, each contain various 'control objects' which describe the formatting, size, and other associated information pertaining to the display of frames.

Growing community of inventors

Hillsborough, CA, United States of America

Nicolas C Nierenberg