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Developer 2000 (Forms 4.5) 'Host' call PROBLEM

From: Duncan MacGregor <aa735_at_FreeNet.Carleton.CA>
Date: 1997/08/20
Message-ID: <5tflm0$kdu@freenet-news.carleton.ca>#1/1

I'm part of a team that is porting a number of forms from (SCO) Unix to Win95. The forms were created with Developer 2000 under Unix.

The biggest problem we are having is accessing a separate program to create or modify some graphic data that we store in the database. In Unix, we would copy the image to a (temporary) file, then call up a public-domain drawing program under X-windows with the 'Host' command in a trigger (usually the WHEN-MOUSE-DOUBLECLICK one attached to the image in question). The second argument 'screen action' is not used or present. Once the drawing program was finished, we would read the (modified/new) image back into Forms, then remove the temporary file.

[One minor nuisance is that the documentation (Forms 4.5 Reference Manual vol. 1) states that when the command finishes, the operator will be "prompted" to "press Return to continue". In practice, the user/operator is never asked to do so on either OS.]

The major PROBLEM we are facing under Windows is that, unlike Unix, the Forms program does *not* wait for the user to finish the command (ie. the drawing program). It continues to run. Since the temporary file is removed right after the command (the drawing program) supposedly finishes, the latter complains that the (temporary) file it was asked to open can't be found -- the Forms trigger code has already removed it!

In all, we have tried the following:

Host(<drawing_app> || temp_file);
Host(<drawing_app> || temp_file, NO_PROMPT); DDE.App_Begin(<drawing_app> || temp_file, DDE.App_Mode_Maximized); Win_API_Shell.WinExec(<drawing_app> || temp_file, Win_API.SW_SHOWMAXIMIZED,   TRUE); All of them seem to work the same way -- Forms does *not* wait for the <drawing_app> to finish. Right now, we are using the Windows "Paintbrush" applet as the drawing program.

Any ideas? Please e-mail me, since I seldom read either newsgroup. If requested,  or if there are many replies, I'll post a summary.

Just a puzzled Canadian ...

--
Duncan MacGregor | aa735_at_freenet.carleton.ca  | #include <disclaimer.h>
Also at: "http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aa735/" | To err is human ...
Received on Wed Aug 20 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT

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