System and method for dynamically constructing synchronized business information user interfaces

摘要

Embodiments of the invention enable data that is synchronized between businesses to be displayed and interacted with by dynamically constructing graphical user interfaces to display the data. The graphical user interfaces are dynamically created via declarations that describe the data and how the data should be displayed along with the dependencies, validation and required characteristics of the data. The resulting dynamically created graphical user interfaces allow separate views of the data to be interacted with depending on the data pool that the data is intended for and a different data pool may be utilized by using a different declarative configuration at run time without recompiling and redistributing the application. The user interface files may be for example an XML file that may be parsed with any compliant schema based or DTD based XML parser. In at least one embodiment of the invention an N-tier architecture may be employed wherein a web server comprising Java Server Pages may utilize java class files that parse and construct the graphical user interface from an XML user interface configuration file. In this embodiment of the invention, HTML pages are output to a diverse array of computing devices capable of executing a HTML compliant browser. Another embodiment of the invention may utilize a standalone application utilizing the same java classes to construct java widgets instead of HTML widgets. Standalone applications may provide quicker responses than HTML applications since there are no round trips required for certain operations such as validation since the validation occurs directly in the application.