AUTOMATED ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM FOR STATE-BASED CONTROL OF A TERMINAL USER INTERFACE

An automated administration system for providing state-based control of soft-labeled keys (SLKs) in a wireless terminal or other type of communication system terminal. In an illustrative embodiment, the automated administration system uses a set of operations to generate information representative of a state machine for controlling labels for the SLKs. The operations process input received from a given user, e.g., a form specifying desired features, layout and language, and generate a state transition table or other suitable representation of a corresponding state machine. Other information generated by the automated administration system may include a control table and a label table. The control table associates a different set of SLK label identifiers with each state in a set of states of the terminal. Each of the label identifiers specifies a label to be associated with a given one of the SLKs in at least one of the states. The label identifiers are used as pointers into the label table which specifies, for each of the label identifiers, a corresponding label for one of the SLKs. The set of operations may be repeated for different users or groups of users of the system, such that a different state machine is generated for each of the users or groups, thereby allowing different users or groups to have different types and arrangements of feature access via their terminal SLKs. The set of operations may be implemented at least in part in software associated with a switch of the system.