Method and apparatus for expression building editors

摘要

According to a preferred embodiment of the present invention, a method and an apparatus for a user-friendly expression builder GUI is disclosed. The preferred embodiment GUI design enables users to construct syntactically valid expressions, without any knowledge of expression syntax. The preferred embodiment provides generic expressions, which serve as starting points in expression building. Each generic expression is a syntactically correct expression containing generic parameters. The GUI user customizes the syntactically correct generic expression, by replacing the generic parameters with parameters specific to the database task at hand. The preferred embodiment provides lists of such specific parameters, including lists of field names and constants, which are selected to build the expression.