Entity projection

• US 20060271382A1
• Filed: 05/27/2005
• Published: 11/30/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 05/27/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Honeyman, Josh W., Anderson, Jeffrey R., Munson, Ryan A., Healy, John A.
• Granted Patent: US 7,720,904 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/217
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/06 Resources, workflows, human or project management; Enterprise or organisation planning; Enterprise or organisation modelling
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/10 Office automation; Time management
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/945 Contract negotiation

Abstract

The present invention provides an entity projection in a client. The entity projection is an encapsulation of data, from an owning service, and residing on a consumer of that service. The entity projection provides an abstraction that conforms to an entity programming model on the consumer. The entity projection may illustratively include a subset of the properties of an entity in the owning service, the subset being only those properties required by the entity and those properties desired by the consumer.

Claims

1. A consumer of desired data from an owning service that owns the data, comprising:

an entity projection, local to the consumer, including properties corresponding to the desired data from the service.

2. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the desired data is represented by an internal entity, with corresponding properties, in the owning service, and wherein the properties in the entity projection comprise a subset of the properties of the internal entity in the owning service.

3. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the entity projection includes properties corresponding to data required by the entity projection.

4. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the entity projection conforms to an entity programming model on the consumer.

5. The consumer of claim 1 and further comprising:

a plurality of entity projections, each including properties representing desired data from a different one of a plurality of services.

6. The consumer of claim 1 and further comprising:

a plurality of associated entity projections.

7. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the consumer comprises a service.

8. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the entity projection is read only.

9. The consumer of claim 1 wherein the consumer includes a local data store and wherein the data backing the entity projection is stored in the local data store.

10. A method of accessing data from an owning service, comprising:

accessing a public data contract for the owning service; and

generating an entity projection from the public data contract, including desired and required properties from an entity in the owning service.

11. The method of claim 10 wherein, when the desired and required properties correspond to associated entities in the owning service, and wherein generating an entity projection further comprises:

generating an entity projection for each of the associated entities.

12. The method of claim 11 and further comprising:

receiving user input indicative of the desired and required properties.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein receiving user input comprises:

displaying publicly available properties, from the public data contract in the owning service, on a user display.

14. The method of claim 13 wherein receiving user input further comprises:

receiving a user input indicative of user selection of a subset of the displayed publicly available properties.

15. The method of claim 14 wherein displaying comprises:

opening a generated entity projection abstraction, populated with required properties, and displaying it on the user display.

16. The method of claim 15 wherein receiving user input comprises:

receiving a user input indicative of a user dragging displayed publicly available properties onto the generated entity projection abstraction and dropping them on the generated entity projection abstraction.

17. The method of claim 10 wherein accessing a public data contract comprises:

accessing a public data contract for each of a plurality of different services; and

displaying the properties for each of the public data contracts accessed.

18. The method of claim 17 wherein generating comprises:

receiving a user input indicative of user-selected properties from entities in the plurality of services; and

generating an entity projection abstraction for each entity association that is selected.

19. A first service, comprising:

a plurality of entities that conform to an entity programming model, at least one of the entities being an entity projection based on an entity in a second service, the entity projection being an encapsulation of desired and required data from the entity in the second service, wherein the desired and required data corresponding to the entity projection is stored in a data store corresponding to the first service.

20. The first service of claim 19 wherein the data store is local to the first service.