Patent ID: 7096189

Claim:
A method for processing changes to purchase orders of items offered for sale in an object oriented order processing system, the method comprising the steps of: receiving a change to an existing purchase order at said order processing system, said change a result of a request by a customer, said order represented by an order object including a reference to a collection of objects containing attribute information; generating, by said order processing system, a change order based on the existing purchase order, the change order containing the change to the existing purchase order; comparing, at said order processing system, the change order to the existing purchase order to generate a change order result referencing an order comparator object that indicates differences between the change order and the existing order, and determining if any other attributes related to the change order are changed based on the change order, and if the other attributes are changed, then supplementing the change order result to indicate the differences between those other attributes, wherein the step of comparing the change order to the existing order comprises the step of: for each object in the existing order for which the change signal indicates a new value for an attribute of a corresponding object in the change order, generating a change order result that identifies: i) the new value of the attribute of the corresponding object in the chance order; and ii) the existing value of the corresponding attribute of the object in the existing order, and wherein the step of comparing is done concurrently with the step of generating a change order, such that the step of generating a change order result in the step of comparing is performed during the processing of each object in the existing order for which the change signal indicates a new value for an attribute of that object; and providing, from said order processing system, the change order result to said customer such that the customer is capable of distinguishing the differences between the change order and the existing purchase order of items offered for sale.