Patent ID: 7711758

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for storing a character string in a human interface infrastructure (HII) database in an extensible firmware interface (EFI) environment, the method comprising computer-implemented operations for: receiving a request to store a character string in the HII database; receiving a plurality of distinct attributes in response to receiving the request to store the character string in the HII database, each of the plurality of distinct attributes corresponding to a portion of the character string; determining whether a previously-generated character string having identical distinct attributes to the character string was previously stored in the HII database; generating the character string based on the plurality of distinct attributes in response to determining that the previously-generated character string having identical distinct attributes was not previously stored in the HII database; storing the character string in the HII database in response to generating the character string; and not storing the character string in the HII database in response to determining that the previously-generated character string having identical distinct attributes was previously stored in the HII database, wherein determining whether a previously-generated character string having identical distinct attributes to the character string was previously stored in HII database comprises performing a lookup operation in a table that correlates distinct attributes for one or more character strings to HII tokens to determine whether the previously-generated character string was previously stored in the HII database, storing the character string in the HII database comprises submitting the character string to the HII database, receiving a token for the character string in response to the submission, and storing the token and the distinct attributes for the character string in the table, the character string comprises an event log entry, the event log entry comprising a time field specifying a time when an event occurs, a date field specifying a date when the event occurs, an error type field specifying an error type for the event, and a severity field specifying a severity of the event, and the distinct attributes specify a format for the time field and the date field.