US 7,353,494 B2Granted

System and method supporting configurable object definitions

AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation

InventorsMorten Nielsen, Pavel Hruby, Lars Hammer, Christian Vibe Scheller

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Abstract

The present invention discloses a system and method supporting high-level configuration of Business Object Types during development of an application. More specifically an application developer is supported with predefined pieces of functionality and meta-data, so called Aspect Types, during the configuration of Business Object Types. An Aspect Type may operate across one or more Business Object Types depending on the functionality of the Aspect Type, e.g. an Aspect Type “Relation” Aspect Type comprises functionality that provides for connection between two or more Business Objects. The functionality comprised in an Aspect Type may be configured with an Event Type so runtime an Event Instance of the Event Type may be triggered either by the functionality of the configured Aspect Type or by e.g. a user of the application.

Claims8

Dependent claims

A computer system having processor configured to run art application program, comprising:

a first store storing aspect pattern metadata associated with a plurality of aspect patterns and object type metadata associated with a plurality of object types, the aspect patterns implementing functionality for the object types and the aspect pattern metadata and object type metadata describing connections between the aspect patterns and the object types wherein the first store also stores event metadata associated with a plurality of event types;
a second store storing aspect pattern instances of the aspect patterns and object instances of the object types wherein the second store stores event instances of the event types;
an object controller controlling interaction between the object instances and the aspect pattern instances based on the aspect pattern metadata and object type metadata wherein the object controller comprises:
an object component configured to receive event instances and provide the event instances to the aspect patterns based on the event metadata;
an aspect pattern component implementing an aspect pattern interface through which the object component passes event instances to the aspect patterns;
and
an event manager component receiving the event instances and managing an order in which the event instances are provided to the object component.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.