Patent ID: 8225221

Claim:
A method comprising: defining a business related object that is associated with object oriented programming in an object definition database by associating the business related object with a plurality of properties; identifying at least a first property group including a first set of the plurality of properties that has a customer property that is a reference to a customer object that has customer properties identifying a customer, and a second property group including a second set of the plurality of properties, the first and second sets being different from one another and being properties of the business related object such that displaying different ones of the first and second property groups results in a different visual representation of the same business related object; associating the first and the second property groups with the business related object in the object definition database; specifying to a representation engine the first property group to represent the business related object on a visual display; utilizing the representation engine and the object definition database to retrieve data corresponding to a property name and value for each of the properties belonging to the first property group, and also retrieving a default set of the customer properties; and displaying on the visual display on a user interface a representation of the business related object that includes a display of the first property group and not the second property group, the display of the first property group including a display of a name of the customer object and the default set of the customer properties.