Patent ID: 8347227

Claim:
A method for displaying related data elements of a variety of data element types on a computer system including a graphical display, the method comprising: providing an element template collection defining user interface graphics for each of the data element types, said element template collection providing a base appearance definition for each of the data element types; providing a relationship view collection defining spatial relationships between a current element of a first specified type and a set of related data elements of at least a second specified type; providing a set of data elements, by a data provider, the set of data elements describing instances of data elements, each data element in the set of data elements having a corresponding data element type, each data element type having a corresponding template in the element template collection; and applying, by a relationship view control comprising computer-executable instructions stored on a computer-readable medium of the computer system, the element template collection and the relationship view collection to the set of data elements to render a layout view comprising a set of graphical elements corresponding to the set of data elements, said rendering comprising: generating the set of graphical elements corresponding to the set of data elements according to the element template collection, said generating comprising supplementing the base appearance definition corresponding to one or more of the data element types to include data provided by the data provider; displaying the generated set of graphical elements based on the base appearance definitions; and spatially arranging the set of graphical elements according to the spatial relationships between the current element and the set of related data elements.