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:
Nov. 06, 2001
Filed:
Sep. 28, 1998
Michael Allen Kaczmarski, Tucson, AZ (US);
Randy Yuan-Yi Tung, San Jose, CA (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
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.