Progress
External Program
Interfaces
Preparing the Server Application
Before opening a DDE conversation from the client, you must ensure that the server application is open on the Windows desktop, and that any server preparations required to make application topics available to the Progress client are complete. The Progress client can open the server application by either by invoking the 4GL OS-COMMAND NO-WAIT statement or by executing the
WinExec()
program load function from the Window’s kernel dynamic link library (DLL),kernel32.dll
. The program load function provides additional features that include specifying the startup window state and returning a value that indicates whether the application actually started. (For more information on accessing Windows DLLs from Progress, see Shared Library and DLL Support.")For example, the following code fragment defines the interface to
WinExec()
, and uses it to load Microsoft Notepad:
Depending on the application, the client might then open an initial conversation for the System topic and execute server commands to initialize additional topics.
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