Office information models and the representation of 'office objects'
Proceedings of the SIGOA conference on Office information systems
OfficeTalk-D: An experimental office information system
Proceedings of the SIGOA conference on Office information systems
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Xerox' Star Professional Workstation is distinguished by a graphic user interface committed to the What-you-see-is-what-you-get design philosophy. The system promotes a see / point / push-a-button style of interaction with immediate feedback, in marked contrast to more familiar programming or command-language interfaces. Star's Records Processing feature integrates traditional data processing functionality into this user model. Normal Star documents may contain fields and tables. Star record files have their structure defined by copying the field structure of a regular document. Multiple output formats are provided for a record file by giving it a document with each desired format. Such a document may format multiple records in a tabular array, or present each record's data in a new copy of the formatting document. Data is transferred between documents and records wherever fields have matching names (“field lading”); non-matching fields may be given a fill-in rule which allows summary data to be computed. Queries are expressed in an exemplary fashion, by entering desired values and ranges of values into a copy of a record (a “filter”). Common uses of the data in a record file are encapsulated in a “view”, which specifies the subset of the file's records to be considered, the order in which they are to be presented, and the document to be used to format them. An arbitrary number of views may be associated with a record file; each may have its own index, but the underlying records are stored only once. Common records processing functions are provided at a high-level user interface: Moving a document, a folder of documents, or another record file to a record file adds records to the file. Moving a record file to a printer causes the current view of the record file to be printed. Benefits include an economy of concepts and effort for user and implementor alike, along with the synergy of a unified environment. The approach seems to extend easily to a number of new domains. However, increased efforts are required to produce a coordinated design and implementation throughout the whole system, and acceptable performance may be harder to achieve.