An Approach to End-Users Application Design

Soon every desk will have a computer on it. Software to do mundane things such as payroll, mail, and text processing exists and as a by-product produces vast quantities of on-line in formation. Many users want to manipulate this data, often in unanticipated ways. These unexpected uses cannot justify substantial programming costs. This paper argues that the relational data model and operators combined with a screen-oriented forms design and display system answers many of the needs of such users. In such a system, all data are represented in terms of records and fields. The user defines the screens (forms) he wants to see, and then specifies the mapping between fields of these screens and fields of the data base records in terms of predicates and relational operators. ______________________________ Copyright © 1981 D. Reidel Publishing Company. Originally appeared as a chapter of Data Base Management and Applications, Andrew Whinston Ed., D. Reidel Publishing, 1981. Republished by Tandem Computers Incorporated with the kind permission of D. Reidel Publishing Company.