Abstract: A system and method for dynamically saving the properties of transient controls in a general screen dialog and enabling these properties to be restored at a later time. In a typical GUI based computer program, a number of user interface objects or “controls” are presented graphically to a user on a form to allow the user to input information by interfacing these controls. The activation of the various controls on the form by a user is referred to as the screen dialog. The present invention allows a user of the computer system to save the current properties of a form's transient controls to a database, where this form can later be restored with its transient controls having the same properties as when the form was saved. A screen dialog save procedure loops through all of the controls on a form and inserts a record of each control type along with its respective property values into a database.