Abstract: Automatically generated user interfaces are provided to aid data population of object instances in graphical programming environments. A selection gesture identifies an instance of an object type. The public fields defined for the instance are automatically determined, and a user interface is automatically generated with the name of each defined field and a currently assigned value for each field that has one. Fields which have no currently assigned value are optionally displayed with a hint. The user interface can be placed in an application under development, such as a sequential workflow application, as a class initializer and/or as an object configurator. When the object to be populated has another object as a field, the fields of that nested object are similarly displayed. Data can be entered into a container object through the user interface without replacing prior value(s) of the container object.