US 8,805,776 B2Granted

Relationship serialization and reconstruction for entities

AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation

InventorsSarah M. Parra, Ravinder R. Vuppula, Jeffrey M. Derstadt, Brian Dawson, Michael J. Pizzo, James Madison Stone, III, Patrick T. Magee, Nadejda V. Poliakova, Daniel G. Simmons

Life of this patent

Estimating the term…

patentgrep

Loading patent…

Abstract

Systems and methods that enable relationship information to be carried along with the entity when serializing/deserializing entities among application tiers. A tracking component tracks information on relationships associated with an entity, and further enables users to perform subsequent change processing on the entity's relationship information. Accordingly, relationship information can be carried along with the entity such that database operation can be performed without requirement of additional information from the database (e.g., foreign key information that is part of associated graphs).

Claims14

Dependent claims

A computer implemented system comprising at least one processor and at least one computer-readable storage medium comprising a magnetic storage device having instructions executable by the at least one processor to implement:

an entity having a plurality of relationships associated therewith;
a tracking component configured to track information associated with at least one of the plurality of relationships, when serializing or deserializing the entity among multiple tiers of a database, the tracking component configured to preserve the at least one of the plurality of relationships by attaching key information to the entity such that the key information acts as a proxy for a relationship between the entity and a related entity during at least the serializing, wherein a retrieval of a value included in the key information follows either a first retrieval protocol if the entity is in a first state or a second retrieval protocol if the entity is in a second state, the first state corresponding to the entity being included in an attached graph and varying according to whether the value is null or non-null, the second state corresponding to the entity being detached.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.