Patent · US Expired

System and method for dynamically expanding and collapsing a tree view for an HTML web interface

US6314424A · kind A · utility

54Cited by
17References
13Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateSep 28, 1998
Grant dateNov 6, 2001
Priority date
Expiry dateSep 28, 2018

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F16/9577
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

The present invention provides a system and method for expanding and collapsing a tree view from a web interface by using HTML to build the visual representation of the web server's information structure, which has the capability to preserve previous tree expansion states in the stateless web HTML environment. In a method according to the present invention, a request comes in from a client browser which contains a universal resource locator (URL). The web server passes the URL to the tree HTML page generation engine to generate the collapsible/expandable tree. The tree HTML page generation engine server will call the corresponding query modules according to the information passed in from the URL. A linked list is generated according to the results returned from one of the query modules. The linked list is then passed into the tree HTML page generation engine. The tree HTML page generation engine generates the HTML page containing nodes. Each node has an embedded URL associated with it and contains a special encoding to memorize the tree expansion state information. The generated tree view is then returned to the web server and then to the browser.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.