Help - Design metadata layer for dynamic joins

I need to do create a query dynamically, based on a variable number of fields selected by a user.
- A user can select from a list of hundreds of fields. The fields are
from various related tables in one Oracle schema.
- I have to design and build a way to create a query on-the-fly that
returns the selected fields.
- To avoid running a query for all the columns if only a subset of
1000 columns is selected, the query needs to be built with only those tables and joins required for the columns selected. So naturally, this involves creating a metadata layer with join information that will help create this query on-the-fly.

Are there any standard design patterns for designing and building such a metadata layer?

Any examples, tips or reference articles would be appreciated. Received on Wed Nov 03 2004 - 18:41:42 CST