REQUEST-DRIVEN ON-DEMAND PROCESSING

• US 20080183726A1
• Filed: 01/31/2007
• Published: 07/31/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 01/31/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Wang, Fang, Carlson, Jason D., Hays, Christopher A., Bruckner, Robert M.
• Granted Patent: US 8,072,467 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/100
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2455 Query execution

Abstract

A rendering system is provided. The rendering system includes a rendering component that receives a request to view a data set and provide output to drive a display application. A processing engine generates output data for the rendering component, where the output data is suitable to satisfy a present demand to render a subset of the data set.

Claims

1. A data processing and rendering system, comprising:

a rendering component that receives a request to view a data set and provide output to drive at least one display application; and

a processing engine that generates subsets of the data set in response to one or more requests for data received from the rendering component, where the subsets are employed by the rendering component to generate a desired target output format

2. The system of claim 1, the request causes the processing component to perform a pre-calculation to determine a portion of the data set.

3. The system of claim 2, the pre-calculation is scalable according to smaller or larger portions of the data set.

4. The system of claim 3, the pre-calculation is stored for use in a subsequent request to view the data set.

5. The system of claim 4, the pre-calculation is stored as persisted data chunks.

6. The system of claim 4, the pre-calculation is stored as persisted group tree chunks.

7. The system of claim 4, the pre-calculation is stored as a report item instance cache.

8. The system of claim 6, further comprising a component to progressively build the persisted group tree trunks.

9. The system of claim 4, further comprising component to define variables which are to be pre-calculated.

10. The system of claim 9, the variables are group variables or report variables.

11. The system of claim 1, the processing engine processes report variables or group variables in view of time dependent calculations or one-time only calculations.

12. The system of claim 11, the report variables include report expressions, page header expressions, and page footer expressions.

13. The system of claim 11, the group variables vary per group instance and are calculated with post-sort and post-filter semantics.

14. The system of claim 1, further comprising a hierarchical cursor to support on-demand processing of data

15. The system of claim 1, the processing engine includes at least one of a report definition, a snapshot component, a format component, a cache component, a sort component, a group component, a filter component, an aggregate component, and a fetch component.

16. A method to render data, comprising:

receiving a rendering request from a remote application;

determining a data subset from a larger data set in response to the rendering request; and

outputting the data subset to the remote application.

17. The method of claim 16, further comprising performing progressive calculations for subsequent requests.

18. The method of claim 17, further comprising incrementally storing tree data structures.

19. The method of claim 18, further comprising adding information to the tree data structures upon subsequent requests.

20. A data rendering system, comprising:

means for processing a request to render a data set according to a present request;

means for rendering a portion of the data set in response to the request; and

means for storing the portion of the data set.