System for storage and navigation of application states and interactions

摘要

Complex collaboration or decision support applications perform complex design or planning tasks, often with the input of large groups of people over long periods of time. The combination of time and complexity can often obscure past actions, making it difficult to remember the factors that influenced earlier stages in the planning task. This is especially true if the task involves many people and different people work at different times. The application state navigation system provides an application-independent mechanism that allows operators to walk back through the history of the application in order to better understand (or remember) the application actions that were taken in the past and the triggers for those actions.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
receiving, from a state processor and by each of a plurality of application processors, state data associated with a particular state of an application interface for an output display, wherein:
a plurality of display devices are each arranged to produce a respective output portion of the output display,for each state, the output display is a single contiguous image that is formed by multiple, aligned image tiles, each image tile representing a respective output portion that is produced by one of the plurality of display devices, andeach of the plurality of application processors is associated with and controls a respective one of the plurality of display devices; providing, by each of the plurality of application processors to each of their respective display devices, a display control signal to produce the respective output portion of the output display for the particular state of the application interface for the output display; receiving, from the state processor and by each of the plurality of application processors, a message indicating detected user interaction with the output display that is formed by the multiple, aligned image tiles; determining, by each of the plurality of application processors, whether the detected user interaction affects the respective output portion of the output display produced by the display device that is controlled by the application processor; determining, by the one or more application processors that are determined to control a display device that produces a respective output portion of the output display that is (i) formed by the multiple, aligned image tiles, and (ii) affected by the detected user interaction, to provide an update control signal to the display device that is controlled by the application processor in order to update the respective output portion of the output display; and determining, by the one or more application processors that are determined to not control a display device that produces a respective portion of the output display that is (i) formed by the multiple, aligned image tiles, and (ii) affected by the detected user interaction, to not provide the update control signal to the display device that is controlled by the application processor.