Patent ID: 7757160

Claim:
A method for debugging a master document of the type used to generate customised documents in a document generation system in which a dynamic questionnaire is generated according to the mark-up of the master document, wherein the markup comprises a plurality of conditional texts and a plurality of variables that control the inclusion of the conditional text the method comprising the steps performed by a computer system of: identifying unexpected behaviour in a questionnaire generated from a master document, wherein the unexpected behaviour is a conditional text being disabled when the conditional text should be enabled, or a conditional text being enabled when the conditional text should be disabled; identifying a variable corresponding to those questions in the questionnaire for which unexpected behaviour occurs; and defining a ranking of the dependencies of the identified variable (V) in the master document, the ranking being a partial ordering such that dependency (V) i occurs before dependency (V) j if and only if: dependency (V) i is equivalent to dependency (V) j or dependency (V) i is implied by dependency (V) j or dependency (V) i does not imply dependency (V) j where dependency (V) k is the dependency logic for the kth occurrence of the variable V in the master document; inspecting the master document for errors at a plurality of locations at which the identified variable occurs by inspecting the locations at which the identified variable occurs in an order according to the ranking of the dependencies.