Breadcrumb navigation through heirarchical structures
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsPuravkumar B. Saraiya, Catherine Elizabeth Dumas, Stephen M. Danton, Balasbramanian Shyamsundar, Pravin R. Indurkar
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A viewer may be used to navigate through diagrammatic views of hierarchically structured documents. Expansion and collapse controls may be used to show or hide details regarding a particular node in the hierarchy. Furthermore breadcrumb navigation may be employed to show and hide details regarding the ancestral chain for a particular node in the hierarchy.
Claims20
A computer program product comprising one or more physical computer-readable media having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause a computing system to formulate a viewer that is structured to perform the following:
- an act of displaying a hierarchical visualization of multiple nodes in a hierarchically structured document, the hierarchical visualization including a visualization for each of the multiple nodes, and a visualization for each relationship between related nodes of the multiple nodes;
- for at least one, a first, of the multiple nodes, an act of providing a child detail control that may be used to expand or collapse the visualization of the first node in a child direction, wherein if the visualization of the first node is expanded in the child direction, one or more children nodes of the first node are emphasized with a control enabling the visualization of the first node to be later collapsed in the child direction, and wherein if the visualization of the first node is collapsed in the child direction, the one or more children nodes of the first node are deemphasized with a control enabling the visualization of the first node to be later expanded in the child direction;
- and
- for at least one, a second, of the multiple nodes, an act of providing a parent detail control that may be used to expand or collapse the visualization of the second node in a parent direction, wherein if the visualization of the second node is expanded in the parent direction, one or more parent nodes of the second node are emphasized with a control enabling the visualization of the second node to be later collapsed in the parent direction, and wherein if the visualization of the second node is collapsed, the one or more parent nodes of the first node are deemphasized with a control enabling the visualization of the second node to be later expanded in the parent direction.
A computer-implemented method for a viewer:
- an act of displaying on a display associated with a computing system a hierarchical visualization of a hierarchically structured document that describes an application program, the hierarchical visualization including a visualization for each of multiple nodes of the document, and a visualization for each relationship between related nodes of the multiple nodes;
- an act of facilitating expansion of collapse of the visualization of selected subsets of the multiple nodes in response to physical user interaction with the computing system, the expansion of a particular node causing more detail regarding the particular node to be visualized on the display as compared to being collapsed including details regarding one or more children nodes of the particular node;
- and
- an act of facilitating breadcrumb navigation to be visualized on the display in response to physical user interaction with the computing system, by permitting the user to selectively breadcrumb ancestral nodes of a selected node such that each of the one or more nodes in an ancestral chain of the selected node is removed from the visualization and instead represented in deemphasized form apart from the hierarchical visualization.
A computer program product comprising one or more physical computer-readable media having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of the computing system, cause a computing system to formulate a viewer that is structured to perform the following:
- an act of displaying a hierarchical visualization of a hierarchically structured document that describes an application program, the hierarchical visualization including a visualization for each of multiple nodes of the document, and a visualization for each relationship between related nodes of the multiple nodes;
- an act of facilitating expansion of collapse of selected subsets of the nodes, the expansion of a particular node causing more detail regarding the particular node to be visualized as compared to being collapsed including details regarding one or more children nodes of the particular node;
- an act of facilitating breadcrumb navigation by permitting the user to selectively breadcrumb ancestral nodes of a selected node such that each of the one or more nodes in an ancestral chain of the selected node is removed from the visualization and instead represented in deemphasized form apart from the hierarchical visualization;
- an act of facilitating collapse-all of the visualization of selected subsets of the multiple nodes in response to physical user interaction with the computing system, the collapse-all causing less detail regarding all descendent nodes of the selected node to be visualized on the display;
- and
- an act of persisting view state corresponding to each of at least some of the multiple nodes in the hierarchically structured document, the view state including at least whether or not the corresponding node is expanded or collapsed.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.