System and method for importing and exporting data between an object oriented computing environment and an external computing environment

摘要

A system and method for importing and exporting data between an object oriented computing environment and an external computing environment encapsulates the validation, conversion, and update control mechanisms for objects in metadata about the objects. Metadata logic operates identically on a variety of internal objects, freeing the object oriented computing environment from the need to duplicate the same control logic for each user interface. During program generation, metadata objects are generated to link an external computing environment data field name, a corresponding object oriented computing environment attribute name and a corresponding external data format for each external data field which is imported and exported. An external class object is defined, including conversion parameters for converting the corresponding object oriented computing environment attribute into the corresponding external data format. External object class metadata objects contain the object oriented computing environment attributes which are used for import and export.