Patent ID: 7519945

Claim:
A method for supporting data driving a software process, the method comprising: providing a choice of a plurality of defining attributes managers to allow selection, from the plurality, of a defining attributes manager to be used to (i) provide to a user a description of the collection of attributes necessary to construct an instance of an object of a non-primitive data type, based only on the class of the object, and (ii) create and initialize the instance of the object using defining attribute data received from the user; using a map means to infer a desirable selection of a defining attributes manager; receiving, from the user, input of the class of the object of the non-primitive data type, the receiving of the class of the object being free of receiving a pre-existing instance of the data type; using a selected defining attributes manager to provide to the user the description of the collection of attributes necessary to construct the instance of the object, based only on the class of the object; receiving, in a single user step, user input of defining attribute data necessary to create the instance of the object and set it into a desired state, the received defining attribute data not including a pre-existing instance of the data type; using the selected defining attributes manager to create and initialize the instance of the object using the received defining attribute data; the receiving of the user input of the defining attribute data, and the creating and initializing of the instance of the object using the received defining attribute data, not requiring knowledge by the user of the constructors, methods, data structure and initialization sequence necessary to construct the instance of the object; and comparing more than one potentially different instance of the data type based on the defining attribute data.