Re: calling windows .DLL from ORACLE Forms?

Three places to look

1. Your help files in Forms 4.5 (I'm presuming 4.5 because of what you want to do), look up the Forms built-in ORA_FFI package.
2. Oracle web pages -> White Papers, 'Boosting Development Productivity with Foreign Function Calls'.
3. \FORMS45\DEMOS\.... There are a number of examples there, see especially \FORMS45\DEMOS\DLL Also one that uses Windows Help from a Form, very useful if you have your own Windows Help compiler.

These all discuss/rely on the ORA_FFI package, which works well enough, *most* of the time, and it's a great way to add some really useful functionality.

 Word of warning, If you have Developer 2000 ver 1.0 then (I'm told by Oracle Support, when I had this problem), the dll stays in memory/attached while your application is running, but in Developer 2000 ver 1.1 (Forms 4.5.6.5.5), each time you close a form, the dll is 'dropped' from memory, and the next/previous form in your stack which makes a call to the dll will raise an exception, regarding the missing function/dll library.

You can get round this, and Oracle issued an update to the Forms pl/sql library file for the DLL example above, which shows how this is done. (They happily faxed this to me, it's not long, 2-3 pages) The solution in a nutshell, was to re-load the dll before each call to the required function. This proved, in my case at least, not nearly as bad as it sounds.

Good luck, this is a pretty satisfying package to get to grips with.

Mike

In article <32F05EBF.57C0_at_redestb.es>, Jorge Fernandez Suarez <cascoscuro_at_redestb.es> writes
>I'm searching some info about the subject, because I've got
>some functions in a DLL that I need to call.
>
>some ideas?
>thanx
> Jorge
 

-- 
Mike Proctor                    Database Consultants International (UK)

Mike_Proctor_at_realworld.com      Oracle vision.
                                Only Oracle.
                                All the time.