U.S. PATENT NUMBER 5,604,899
Data relationship processor with unlimited expansion capability
- Effective Filing Date: May 21, 1990
- Patent Issue Date: February 18, 1997
A computer software method to define Entity and Relationship Types, Relationship Categories1, the rules2 that govern the relationships, and to create instances of these entities and relationships. New relationship types can be added without programming.
Note 1: Relationship Categories allow a given relationship type to connect a given primary entity type to one of several secondary entity types. Most traditional applications or DBMS’ can handle only a single secondary entity type in a relationship definition.
Note 2: For information on relationship rules such as mandatory enforcement and cardinality, refer to U.S. Patent Numbers 5,652,882 and 5,675,779.
The Prior Art required software developers to develop complex code to handle their application’s specific relationship processing requirements. This locked their business functionality code to a specific data model design inside hand coded programs - which was both a time consuming and error prone methodology.
Software developers can focus on developing genuine business functionality in their code rather than having to also code all the complex features needed for relationship processing. This is particularly so for applications that require flexible and powerful relationship management capabilities, e.g., pricing, costing and billing systems.