The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 01, 2000
Filed:
Mar. 07, 1997
Didier Daniel Bardon, Austin, TX (US);
Richard Edmond Berry, Georgetown, TX (US);
Scott Harlan Isensee, Georgetown, TX (US);
Shirley L Martin, Austin, TX (US);
John Martin Mullaly, Austin, TX (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A data processing system (100) transforms the limited user interface toolkits currently in use in the software development industry to provide control interfaces which are sensitive to a user's operational context. The data processing system does not create control objects by assembling ready-made controls available in the user interface toolkit of the development system, but generates a control object which has a custom designed appearance that is relevant to the context of the action the control should perform, to the kind of object which includes the control, and to the type of data to which the control is applied. The data processing system performs these operations through the implementation of a methodology wherein a central processing unit of the data processing system identifies the control interfaces included in an object to be display on a display device (138). For each control interface included in the object to be displayed, the central processing unit determines whether the control interface is a custom design. If the control interface does not have a custom design, the data required for configuring the control interface is retrieved from a memory (116, 114) and displayed in accordance with the control interface provided by the development system. Conversely, if the control interface does have a custom design, data is retrieved from memory to configure the control interface in a manner desired by a designer of the graphical user interface. The data representing the object in the control interface, whether custom designed or standard, is then provided to a display adapter which transforms that data to enable a display device to display the object in the control interface.