Method and apparatus for declarative updating of self-describing, structured documents
First Claim
Patent Images
1. A method of preparing a response to a field-tagged document received electronically, the method including:
- receiving a field-tagged document and detecting its document type;
applying a first style sheet to generate a draft reply document and building an in-memory representation of the draft reply document;
applying a second style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft reply document; and
accepting edits, updating the in-memory draft reply document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and either persisting it for later use or sending it as a reply to the field-tagged document.
2 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
The present invention includes a method and device for updating a self-describing, structured document. A further aspect of the present invention is enabling client-based modification of the document. Additional aspects of the present invention are described in the claims, specification and drawings.
100 Citations
17 Claims
-
1. A method of preparing a response to a field-tagged document received electronically, the method including:
-
receiving a field-tagged document and detecting its document type; applying a first style sheet to generate a draft reply document and building an in-memory representation of the draft reply document; applying a second style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft reply document; and accepting edits, updating the in-memory draft reply document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and either persisting it for later use or sending it as a reply to the field-tagged document. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
-
-
7. A method of editing draft field-tagged documents, the method including:
-
retrieving a draft field-tagged document and detecting its document type; building an in-memory representation of the draft document; applying a first style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document; and accepting edits updating the in-memory draft document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and persisting it for later use, wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify nodes of the in-memory draft document to which edits are applied. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9, 10, 11, 12)
-
-
13. A method of composing draft field-tagged documents, the method including:
-
receiving a specification of a document type for a field-tagged document to draft; building an in-memory representation of the draft document; applying a first style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document; and accepting edits updating the in-memory draft document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and persisting it for later use, wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify nodes of the in-memory draft document to which edits are applied. - View Dependent Claims (14, 15, 16)
-
-
17. A device for composing and editing generic field-tagged documents, the device including:
-
a processor; a schema repository of schemas for field-tagged documents of various document types; a style sheet repository of style sheets applicable to the document types adapted to generate an interface that supports editing of an in-memory draft document; a user interaction module that receives a request from a user to compose or edit a field-tagged document; an document module that builds an in-memory representation of a draft document, responsive to the user interaction module and compliant with a schema from the schema repository; and a transformation module that applies a style sheet to the in-memory representation of the draft document, to generate an editing interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document, wherein the document module is further adapted to update the in-memory draft document, marshal it into a field-tagged format, and persist it for later use.
-
Specification