Computer systems allow for the exchange of information in a variety of ways. Conventional software applications operate on computer systems to allow people, commonly referred to as forms developers, to design and create electronic forms. An electronic form is a digital document that can be defined with form fields that can be electronically populated with data. Other computer users, often referred to as end users, can provide the data to the form fields to create a completed or populated form using a form completion application. An example of an electronic form is a Portable Document Format (PDF) form that a forms developer can create, and that an end user can populate, each using a software application such as Adobe Acrobat manufactured by Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., U.S.A. Adobe and Acrobat are Trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. In one configuration, such conventional forms development and forms population software applications or systems allow an end-user to specify a data object to be provided for an electronic form. Such a data object can be a data source that defines many data structures, data records, text or numeric data or other types of records having a common data organization—known as a schema. By providing the data object to the electronic form, the conventional software application that manages electronic forms can populate multiple versions of the form with each record of data from the data object as defined by the schema. In this manner, the end-users can populate many versions of the form with the data from the data object for any intended purpose. This population of forms with data sources defined by a schema can be automated to populate many forms at one time with little end user intervention.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds