Patent ID: 7676482

Claim:
A method of obtaining data from a data set of a data source and rendering the data to an interface, comprising: sending a first request message to a data provider, the first request message including a length parameter indicating an amount of data the data provider is to send, wherein the length parameter limits the amount of data that is to be sent in reply to the first request message, regardless of the actual size of the data source's data set; receiving a first response message from the data provider in response to the first request message, the first response message comprising the amount of data indicated by the length parameter such that a user does not have to wait for the entire data set to be downloaded, the first response message further having a schema component and a data component, wherein the data component includes at least one data record having at least one data element requested by the first request message and the schema component includes a name component, a display component, and a type component containing presentation information for rendering the at least one data element in the at least one data record, the type component instructing the interface whether the at least one data element is to be displayed as an image or displayed as HTML, wherein because the user obtains the schema with each data request, the interface can dynamically render a continually changing data set; buffering the data elements of the data set without buffering the presentation information, such that redundant presentation information is not stored while the data elements are stored; and dynamically rendering data from the data component to the interface according to the schema component.