Patent ID: 7383554

Claim:
An information processing apparatus that communicates with an image forming apparatus, said information processing apparatus comprising: recognizing means for making a recognition that a driver program for an image forming process is to be installed into said information processing apparatus; searching means for searching for an image forming apparatus on the network; obtaining means for obtaining construction information from the image forming apparatus searched by said searching means via the network in response to the recognition made by said recognizing means, wherein the construction information is related to an optional unit connected to the image forming apparatus, and wherein said obtaining means obtains the construction information using a construction information obtaining program which is activated upon driver program installation; setting means for setting the construction information obtained by said obtaining means to the driver program so that it can be read by the driver program; and display control means for controlling a process to display a setting display screen for displaying the setting for the driver program, wherein said display control means controls the display of the setting display screen to automatically set a setting value related to the optional unit connected to the image forming apparatus obtained by said obtaining means on the setting display screen in accordance with the construction information, said obtaining means obtains the construction information using Simple Network Management Protocol, the apparatus further comprises (a) a memory and (b) converting means for converting the construction information in the Management Information Base format into DEVMODE format, and the construction information is set into a predetermined memory area in the memory in the DEVMODE format by a printer driver calling an application programming interface of an operating system.