Patent Document ID: 7529734
Application ID: 10986638

Base Claim:
1. A method for facilitating user queries to a database, comprising: determining one or more search fields from query criteria generated by a user in a client-side application; automatically generating one or more query criteria templates from the determined one or more search fields by extracting search-field names, search-field data types, and search-field length from a set of user interface metadata; obtaining search-field values from the one or more query criteria templates; and representing the search-field names and search-field values in an XML format which can be stored in a column of the record corresponding to the one or more query criteria templates; storing the one or more query criteria templates in a single template table in the database, wherein the query template table comprises rows and columns, wherein each row in the query template table corresponds to a query criteria template and comprises one or more of template name, user name, creation time, and flag type corresponding to a specific query criteria template record, and wherein a query criteria template contains information on search-field names and search-field values for a query; populating a query form with appropriate search-field values; and allowing a user to select a template from the stored query criteria templates prior to performing a query, thereby reducing manual entry of search-field values for similar queries.

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Claim 7:
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein representing the search-field names and search-field values in a parsable format involves representing the extracted search-field names and search-field values in an XML file and storing the XML file as a CLOB or a BLOB.