Patent ID: 7607078

Claim:
A method for processing forms in a computer system, comprising: receiving from a human operator a unified form template specifying a joint design of a paper form and an electronic form (e-form), wherein the unified template comprises data fields and respective attributes, of which a common attribute is specified jointly for a given data field in both the paper form and the e-form; automatically producing, based on the unified form template, paper forms to be filled in by hand by first clients of the computer system and e-forms to be filled in electronically by second clients of the computer system; accepting filled-in paper forms, in which first data items have been filled in by hand into the given data field by the first clients, and filled-in e-forms, in which second data items have been filled in electronically into the given data field by the second clients; extracting the first and second data items respectively from the filled-in paper forms and the filled-in e-forms; and validating, using the common attribute, both the first data items that were extracted from the filled-in paper forms and the second data items that were extracted from the filled-in e-forms.