Patent ID: 7360175

Claim:
A navigation aid for hierarchical structures having multiple levels of nodes, the navigational aid comprising: hierarchy display means for displaying the nodes in a multilevel hierarchical structure, wherein nodes having ancestors can be collapsed to the level of any ancestor and nodes having descendants can be expanded to the level of any descendant; icon display means for displaying in the vicinity of the name of each node a conventional expand-and-collapse icon used to swap the expanded and collapsed states of each node; and menu display means for gathering statistics about the current state of the hierarchical structure, for dynamically generating information from the statistics, for adjusting the information generated dynamically from the statistics based on the position of a selected node displayed in the hierarchical structure, and for displaying a dynamic menu associated with the selected node, wherein the dynamic menu is separate from the displayed nodes in the multilevel hierarchical structure and includes: (a) for each ancestor level of the hierarchical structure above the selected node, an option to collapse the hierarchical structure to the level of the ancestor with a single action, based on the information generated dynamically from the statistics. (b) an entry identifying the selected node and in which level of expansion from the root node the selected node resides, based on the fully collapsed condition of the hierarchical structure, and (c) for each descendant level of the hierarchical structure below the selected node, an option to display the nodes at the descendant level, based on the information generated dynamically from the statistics.