a method and software component for inquiring about security relationships is disclosed . the method and software component perform class instantiations and method invocations necessary to retrieve security relationship information for display to a user . the method and software component may perform various manipulations of the security relationship information . the manipulations may comprise eliminating duplicate security relationship information . the method and software component enable a graphical user interface to avoid being cluttered with the necessary coding to retrieve the security relationship information . instead , the gui may simply invoke a function of the software component to retrieve the security relationship information .