An Approach to User Specification of Interactive Display Interfaces

Forms have become widely used as a user interface for database systems. By analyzing the components of forms, a unified treatment of aggregation operators, headings, subheadings, and internal logic of a form is possible. In this paper we present a theory and a system based on that theory which allows users to easily specify displays. Displays are composed of components and the user can specify geometry of the components and grouping relationships between the components which allow for the generation of the desired display.