PERSISTENCE SPECIFICATION SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PRODUCING PERSISTENT AND TRANSIENT SUBMAPS IN A MANAGEMENT STATION FOR A DATA COMMUNICATION NETWORK

Discovery/layout software configures a general purpose computer system to act as a management station using an industry standard SNMP protocol. The discovery/layout software has a discovery mechanism and a layout mechanism which, in combination, permit the discovery/layout software to provide various submaps to a display for illustrating network topology, which includes devices and device interconnections of the network. The submaps correspond to various hierarchical views of the network. Significantly, a persistence specification mechanism is provided in the discovery/layout software for specifying a submap as either transient (generated upon demand) or persistent (exists whether demanded or not). An integrating application as well as the user can identify a submap as persistent. This feature enables better interfacing of the integrating application with the station, thereby providing more information to the user. This feature further minimizes memory requirements as well as requisite processing time due to the elimination of unnecessary submaps and the elimination of processing of topology changes relative to the unnecessary submaps.