Patent ID: 7860838

Claim:
A computer implemented method for managing entities in a computer system, comprising: relating the managed entities and sub-entities each with a node into a hierarchical tree structure having multiple levels and being defined in a common information model with a tree root and child associations; dynamically manipulating meta data representing properties of the hierarchical tree structure, the meta data defined in the common information model as a set of informational data; traversing the tree structure until the tree root and all of the child associations are encountered without knowledge of the structure of the individual nodes and without mapping between a document schema and a hierarchical database, wherein a tree level change is performed for every level in the tree until no child associations are found if the association is in a predefined list of child associations; and determining an origination of each managed entity based on the associations encountered for at least one of adding, deleting or revising information associated with the node for dynamically propagating a status of the managed entities of the hierarchical tree structure, wherein the hierarchical tree structure is generated dynamically by propagating the status to nodes that are associated with a child association until the root of the tree is found without associating any object with any configuration value and without having any knowledge of elements in the hierarchical tree structure.