Patent ID: 7093195

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of building an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application response message for interacting with an ERP application comprising: requesting meta data from said ERP application for one or more data objects of said ERP application, said meta data organized into objects defining variants that include an inbound or outbound class for tracking information provided to and from said ERP application; upon receiving said meta data generating at least one master file specifying a message format for populating at least one particular data object with the inbound or outbound class provided by at least one of said variants and updating said inbound or outbound class to describe whether said data object is provided to or provided from said ERP application, each master file identifying a particular data obiect to populate and specifying element names which correspond to fields of said particular data object, said meta data describing said particular data object; determining a technique for mapping particular data items specified by at least one flat file to said element names specified in said master file; and generating said application response message as a markup language representation of said particular data object according to said determined mapping technique and said specified message format.