Method and apparatus for declarative updating of self-describing, structured documents

1. A method of preparing a response to a field-tagged document received electronically, the method including:

receiving a field-tagged document and detecting its document type;

applying a first style sheet to generate a draft reply document and building an in-memory representation of the draft reply document;

applying a second style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft reply document; and

accepting edits, updating the in-memory draft reply document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and either persisting it for later use or sending it as a reply to the field-tagged document.

2. The method of claim 1 , further including identifying the first and second style sheets using the document type and the draft reply document.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the second style sheet uses hidden fields to identify locations of the in-memory draft reply document to which edits are applied.

4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the second style sheet uses hidden fields to identify field names of the draft reply document to which edits are applied.

5. The method of claim 1 , further including:

error checking the draft reply document and generating an error report of any errors detected either as an in-memory representation of the errors detected or a field-tagged error report document; and

applying a third style sheet to merge the draft reply document and the error report and generate an interface that juxtaposes error messages with parts of the draft reply document containing errors.

6. The method of claim 5 , wherein:

the applying of the third style sheet further includes generating an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft reply document; and

the method further includes accepting edits, updating the in-memory draft reply document, marshalling it into a field-tagged format, and either persisting it for later use or sending it as a reply to the field-tagged document.

7. A method of editing draft field-tagged documents, the method including:

retrieving a draft field-tagged document and detecting its document type;

building an in-memory representation of the draft document;

applying a first style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document; and

accepting edits updating the in-memory draft document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and persisting it for later use,

wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify nodes of the in-memory draft document to which edits are applied.

8. The method of claim 7 , further including identifying the first style sheet using the document type of the draft document.

9. The method of claim 7 , further including further selecting the first style sheet from among a hierarchy of generic and customized style sheets using a rule selector keyed to the document type.

10. The method of claim 7 , further comprising:

error checking updated the draft document and generating an error report of any errors detected either as an in-memory representation of the errors detected or a field-tagged error report document; and

applying a second style sheet to merge the updated draft document and the error report and generate an interface that juxtaposes error messages with parts of the draft document containing errors.

11. The method of claim 10 , wherein:

the applying of the second style sheet further includes generating an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document; and

the method further comprises accepting edits, updating the in-memory draft document, marshalling it into a field-tagged format, and either persisting it for later use or sending it as a reply to the field-tagged document.

12. The method of claim 7 , wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify field names of the draft document to which edits are applied.

13. A method of composing draft field-tagged documents, the method including:

receiving a specification of a document type for a field-tagged document to draft;

building an in-memory representation of the draft document;

applying a first style sheet to generate an interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document; and

accepting edits updating the in-memory draft document, marshalling it into field-tagged format, and persisting it for later use,

wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify nodes of the in-memory draft document to which edits are applied.

14. The method of claim 13 , further including identifying the first style sheet using the document type of the draft document.

15. The method of claim 13 , further comprising:

error checking updated the draft document and generating an error report of any errors detected either as an in-memory representation of the errors detected or a field-tagged error report document; and

applying a second style sheet to merge the updated draft document and the error report and generate an interface that juxtaposes error messages with parts of the draft document containing errors.

16. The method of claim 13 , wherein the first style sheet uses hidden fields to identify field names of the draft document to which edits are applied.

17. A device for composing and editing generic field-tagged documents, the device including:

a processor;

a schema repository of schemas for field-tagged documents of various document types;

a style sheet repository of style sheets applicable to the document types adapted to generate an interface that supports editing of an in-memory draft document;

a user interaction module that receives a request from a user to compose or edit a field-tagged document;

an document module that builds an in-memory representation of a draft document, responsive to the user interaction module and compliant with a schema from the schema repository; and

a transformation module that applies a style sheet to the in-memory representation of the draft document, to generate an editing interface that supports editing of the in-memory draft document,

wherein the document module is further adapted to update the in-memory draft document, marshal it into a field-tagged format, and persist it for later use.