DATABASE INTEGRATED VIEWER

• US 20110191384A1
• Filed: 02/01/2010
• Published: 08/04/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 02/01/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Roberts, Scott M., Box, Donald F., Mollicone, Laurent, Flynn, James R., Jayadevan, Siddharth
• Granted Patent: US 8,732,146 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/802
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/248 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 17/00 Digital computing or data processing equipment or methods, specially adapted for specific functions information retrieval, database structures or file system structures therefor G06F16/00
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 7/00 Methods or arrangements for processing data by operating upon the order or content of the data handled logic circuits H03K19/00

Abstract

A database integration viewer that allows additional properties to be associated with a record as viewed in a single record or table, even though those additional properties are not owned by the record in the underlying source record or table in the database. Using this integration view, a viewed version of record or table may be different than the actual structure of the source record or table. In the viewed version of the record or table, the viewed record or table or may include some or all of the properties for the records of the subject record or table, while incorporating one or more additional properties for the record into the viewed table. The properties may be scalars, or may be computed to populate the viewed version of the record or table.

Claims

1. A non-transitory computer program product comprising one or more physical non-transitory computer-readable media having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause the computing system to instantiate a database integration viewer, the database integration viewer configured to formulate a view table that is a view of a database table by performing the following:

for each of at least some of a plurality of properties of the database table, an act of populating a corresponding property in the view table using the corresponding property of the database table;

for at least one property of the view table, an act of computing a value for the property from data external to the database table; and

an act of displaying a view table in which the at least some of the plurality of properties of the database table are displayed, and displaying the at least one computed property.

2. The computer program product in accordance with claim 1, wherein the at least one property of the view table comprises a plurality of computed properties.

3. The computer program product in accordance with claim 1, wherein the computed property is an assigned scalar value.

4. The computer program product in accordance with claim 1, wherein for a given one computed property, the act of computing the value for the property is performed by performing the following:

an act of accessing an expression;

an act of evaluating the expression;

an act of assigning a result of the expression as the value of the computed property.

5. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the expression includes as input a reference to a property from a second database table.

6. The computer program product in accordance with claim 5, wherein the expression also includes as input a reference to a property from a third database table.

7. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the expression is a reference to a property from a record outside the database table.

8. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the expression is an arithmetic expression.

9. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the result of the expression is a scalar.

10. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the result of the expression comprises a record.

11. The computer program product in accordance with claim 4, wherein the result of the expression comprises a plurality of records.

12. The computer program product in accordance with claim 1, wherein integrated database viewer is one of a plurality of table viewers offered by the computer program product.

13. A non-transitory computer program product comprising one or more physical non-transitory computer-readable media having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause the computing system to instantiate a database integration viewer, the database integration viewer configured to formulate a view record that is a view of a database record by performing the following:

for each of at least some of a plurality of properties of the database record, an act of populating a corresponding property in the view record using the corresponding property of the database record;

for at least one property of the view record, an act of computing a value for the property from data external to the database record; and

an act of displaying a view record in which the at least some of the plurality of properties of the database record are displayed, and displaying the at least one computed property in a manner associated with the view record.

14. The computer program product in accordance with claim 13, wherein the at least one property of the view record comprises a plurality of computed properties.

15. The computer program product in accordance with claim 13, wherein the at least some of a plurality of properties of the database record comprises all of the properties of the database record.

16. The computer program product in accordance with claim 13, wherein the database records is part of a database table.

17. The computer program product in accordance with claim 13, wherein for a given one computed property, the act of computing the value for the property is performed by performing the following:

an act of accessing an expression;

an act of evaluating the expression;

an act of assigning a result of the expression as the value of the computed property.

18. The computer program product in accordance with claim 17, wherein the expression includes as input a reference to a property from outside of the database record.

19. The computer program product in accordance with claim 17, wherein the result of the expression comprises a plurality of records.

20. A computer-implemented method for formulating a view table that is a view of a database table, the method comprising:

for each of a plurality of properties of the database table, an act of equating a value of a corresponding property in the view table as being the same as a value of the corresponding property of the database table;

for at least one property of the view table, an act of computing a value for the property from data external to the database table, the computation following an expression associated with the at least one property of the view table, each of the at least one property of the view table corresponding to a column in the view table, wherein the act of computing the value comprises;

an act of accessing an expression;

an act of evaluating the expression;

an act of assigning a result of the expression as the value of the computed property; and

an act of displaying a view table in which the plurality of properties of the database table are displayed, and in which the at least one computed property.