Dynamic object communication protocol
US5898871A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | May 27, 1997 |
| Grant date | Apr 27, 1999 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | May 27, 2017 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F9/449
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
The present invention provides a uniform method for dynamically determining an object's communication requirements. The invention provides the ability to determine the requirements for communicating with an object regardless of the object's implementation (i.e., whether keys were implemented as methods or instance variables). The invention is used in conjunction with the runtime description of an object to provide a technique for communicating with an object. The present invention uses "key-value coding" to represent data. Key-value coding uses a dictionary of key-value pairs to represent a property and a value of the property. For example, a data value, "Joe" stored in a column of a database table that contains employees' first names is represented in a key-value pair as: Key="firstName", Value="Joe". The property of the key in this key-value pair is "firstName". The method for loading data into an object is "takeValuesFromDictionary". This method takes a dictionary of key-value pairs and in the default implementation it runs through that dictionary and looks for any key names that match the "get" or "set" method call. The method for getting values is valuesForKeys:, which extract…
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.