Patent ID: 8751480

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising instructions for accessing data on a secondary storage, the instructions executable by a processor connected to a primary storage and to the secondary storage, the computer-readable medium comprising: instructions for receiving a first file identifier for a first file stored in the secondary storage, the first file associated with a first file type and holding the data in one or more first data elements; instructions for receiving a second file identifier for a second file stored in the secondary storage, the second file associated with a second file type and holding the data in one or more second data elements; instructions for accessing the first file and the second file stored on the second storage; instructions for creating a data structure in the primary storage, the data structure representing a plurality of non-sequential segments of the data from the first file and the second file, the data from the first file and the second file being stored non-sequentially in the secondary storage, the plurality of non-sequential segments including file content data, the data structure providing sequential access to the plurality of non-sequential segments of the data from the first file and the second file; instructions for creating a formatter object based on the first file type and the second file type, the formatter object accessing the file content data stored in the secondary storage based on the first file type and the second file type and facilitating file content data transfer between the first file, the second file, and the data structure; instructions for receiving user input, the user input representative of a user action and including a first command of a first application programming interface (API), the first command accessing the one or more first data elements of the first file and the one or more second data elements of the second file by indexing into the data structure, the first API being in an array-based programming language; instructions for transforming the user input into a second command of a second application programming interface (API), the second command of the second API being directed at the secondary storage; and instructions for accessing the one or more first data elements of the first file and the one or more second data elements of the second file stored in the secondary storage using the second command of the second API, the one or more accessed first data elements and the one or more accessed second data elements including file content data being dynamically retrievable on an as needed basis.