Patent ID: 7665062

Claim:
In a form-based development system, a method for dynamically constructing a form under an object framework during development of an application by a user, the method comprising: providing an ancestor class under the object framework, the ancestor class for representing a form in the development system; in response to user input, creating a descendant class inheriting from the ancestor class for representing a particular form to be included in the application without directly manipulating metadata of the ancestor class; generating intermediate language instructions for creating methods of the descendant class under the object framework; creating a type delegator for the descendant class, the type delegator being configured to persist information associated with the particular form and to intercept the metadata using a metadata application programming interface call, the metadata being manipulated to change a class type associated with the type delegator dynamically and to create a data structure to track changes to be instantiated with the particular form and the descendant class being configured to act as a proxy configured to represent the particular form, thereby enabling the descendant class to track changes made to the particular form during development of the application; creating an instance of the descendant class; constructing the particular form in the development system based on the instance of the descendant class and making a design time representation of the particular form visible to the user without using source code and without compiling the descendant class; tracking changes to the particular form made during development of the application using the type delegator, the type delegator being configured to persist the information to the descendent class without changing the particular form during development of the application prior to runtime; and subsequently, generating a version of the particular form at runtime based on persisted information.