Re: Any ideas Forms 4.5, SQLPLUS and Word?

Back when we wore animal skins crudely stitched together and programmed by chipping the code into stone tablets, we wrote DOS command files. These are text files that contain a sequence of DOS commands. They have an extension of ".bat". You could write a .bat file, say merge.bat, that does this:

sqlplus username/password_at_dbname @sqlfile winword outfile

The command file executes the SQL script, then Word. Your host command in the Form would look like this:

host('merge');

I'm not sure whether Forms waits for merge.bat to finish before returning control to your form. You'll have to check that.

>Fraser Boswell <Fraser.Boswell_at_ed.ac.uk> wrote in article
><3712FCE7.D0A26095_at_ed.ac.uk>...
>> We have scripts kept in sql files in the filesystem which we want to
>> run. These will create CSV files for use in a mail merge. So from Forms
>> 4.5 we want a user to run the script by pressing a button, and when that
>>
>> is finished open Word for Windows with the mail merge set for the data
>> file created. We want to do this in one go. Problem is, setting the
>> script off to run in sqlplus works fine, but as the script may take some
>>
>> time to run, if we run this HOST('sqlplus username/pwd_at_dbname) command
>> followed immediately by opening word we could, and probably will have
>> Word open before the datafile is ready.
Received on Tue Apr 13 1999 - 16:49:49 CDT