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:
Jul. 09, 2002
Filed:
Mar. 01, 1999
David Bruce Lection, Raleigh, NC (US);
Roland Albert Merrick, Evesham, GB;
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A method, system, and computer-readable code for a technique with which data having dynamically variable record formats (such as that created when a dynamic schema is used with a data repository) can be easily and efficiently accommodated, without requiring modification of the code that processes the data each time the underlying data format changes. This mechanism provides a novel way to gather data that may have had changes to its format, and create a structured representation of this data that flexibly adapts to format variations. This novel technique enables all added data fields in a record to be made available for processing and removed data fields to be omitted, without requiring advance knowledge of the added and removed fields. In the preferred embodiment, a DOM tree created from an XML representation of the source data is used by the present invention as it creates an output DOM tree. Optionally, the results of an LDAP query from an LDAP directory can be used as the source data.