METHOD, COMPUTER PROGRAM PRODUCT, SYSTEM AND DATA STRUCTURE FOR FORMATTING TRANSACTION RESULTS DATA

A method, computer program product, system, and data structure used in mapping data received from a centralized transaction processing system, such as the IMS system available from IBM, at the request of a remote application program or other client made across a communications network, such as the Internet. In one embodiment, a transaction code, a map identifier, and other information necessary for the transaction are sent to a centralized system or server. The transaction is executed on the transaction processing system and results data received therefrom. The map is then accessed in order to format the results data before returning it to the requesting client. One form of information that could be used within a map are source-destination triplets. In this instance, there is a source indicator, a destination offset into a buffer, and a length indicating how much to transfer from the indicated source into a buffer. The source indicator may be either a literal value or an offset into a results data set. An alternative form of map consists of offset-length pairs and literal value-length pairs, where the offset is the offset into the results data and the length is the amount of data to use therefrom into the formatted results data, and the literal value is placed directly into the formatted results data for the specified length. This allows the formatted results data to be tailored to the needs of the client thereby allowing reduced client sophistication and development cost, better bandwidth utilization since only relevant data is sent over the communications network, and higher data security since sensitive data may be prohibited from being sent over the public communications network, such as the Internet.