Russell A Richardson

US Patent:

7237227, Jun 26, 2007

Filed:

Aug 4, 2003

Appl. No.:

10/634326

Inventors:

Shu Lei - Belmont CA, US
Yuhong Wang - Union City CA, US
Russell Richardson - San Francisco CA, US
Anil Mukundan - San Jose CA, US
Vipul Shroff - Sunnyvale CA, US
Isaac Levin - Sunnyvale CA, US
Ravikumar Gampala - Dublin CA, US

Assignee:

Siebel Systems, Inc. - San Mateo CA

International Classification:

G06F 9/44
G06F 9/455

US Classification:

717110, 716 11, 717113

Abstract:

Embodiments of the present invention provide methods and apparatuses for quickly and easily configuring an application user interface using a flexible generic layout file. For one embodiment, a free-form grid layout is provided that allows an application provider to create a desired number of placeholders, each of a desired size, by positioning objects at desired locations on the free-form grid. In this way the application provider configures the application user interface. For one embodiment, the placeholders are created by dragging selected objects, from a provided set of objects, onto the grid layout. For such an embodiment, a set of parameters that describe the objects on the grid layout (e. g. , indicating number, size, and location) is stored to a database. At run-time, the parameters are used to dynamically generate HTML code, which when executed presents the application user interface.