International Business Machines Corporation

Randy Yuan-Yi Tung

Michael Allen Kaczmarski

May Ngun Wone

Sandra Sheu Chang

A report generating and viewing method ( ) for generating and viewing reports ( ) over the internet ( ). A request from a browser ( ) is sent to a server ( ) whereupon a generate reports program ( ) in a server ( ) creates an intermediate file ( ) containing all the necessary data and metadata. When a request from the browser ( ) to view the report ( ) is sent, a view reports program ( ) in the server ( ) parses the intermediate file ( ) and sends a menu ( ) to the browser ( ). The user then selects a report from the menu ( ) and the server ( ) sends the report ( ) to the browser ( ).

Dynamically generated HTML formatted reports

The present invention provides a system and method for expanding and collapsing a tree view from a web interface by using HTML to build the visual representation of the web server's information structure, which has the capability to preserve previous tree expansion states in the stateless web HTML environment. In a method according to the present invention, a request comes in from a client browser which contains a universal resource locator (URL). The web server passes the URL to the tree HTML page generation engine to generate the collapsible/expandable tree. The tree HTML page generation engine server will call the corresponding query modules according to the information passed in from the URL. A linked list is generated according to the results returned from one of the query modules. The linked list is then passed into the tree HTML page generation engine. The tree HTML page generation engine generates the HTML page containing nodes. Each node has an embedded URL associated with it and contains a special encoding to memorize the tree expansion state information. The generated tree view is then returned to the web server and then to the browser.

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Randy Yuan-Yi Tung