[AccessD] Talking between Applications (final notes)

Just an FYI, the code I have posted is in use in VB 6.  It should work
fine with Access VBA, but I know there will be two quirks.  First, the
ISFEMonitoring class uses frmMain's timer, the code will have to be
changed for that, because Access forms have the timers as a native
object, instead of a separate object.  The timer is used to allow the
windows messaging API's to completely finish before trying to do
something with the message that came through.  During testing, without
this process in place, when I ran a 'pulse', it would run about 80 times
before the code would just stop.  No errors, it just stopped sending,
because the code was firing messages back and forth without letting each
progressive message finish on it's own.  So instead of working the with
message immediately, it's added to a collection, and the timer is used
to kick start the process of working with the messages.    The other
quirk is that frmMain is adding messages to a listbox, in VB, you can
just use an AddItem method, can't do that with an Access listbox.  So
another method should be used to display message results.

 

There is also functionality that isn't used in the sample.  The
ISFEMessage has two ways it can be sent.  SendMessage and
BroadcastMessage.  To use sendmessage, the ISFEMonitoring class must
handshake, so it can find the hWnd of the window it's supposed to
communicate with.  It only needs to handshake once, then SendMessage
will send messages back and forth between the same two applications.
(which is what the pulse 'test' process does).  BroadcastMessage (which
I don't demo with the form) sends a message to EVERY window out there.
Note, I only have it working for sending a long integer (through the
SecondParameter) value of the ISFEMessage class.  To broadcast other
data, the receiving windows would have to NOT destroy the data window.
I don't need this capability, so I didn't setup my code to do this.  One
ideas, if broadcasting text data is necessary, would be to just create a
single 'data' window, and keep it open while the class is in use, then
destroy it when the ISFEMessaging class terminates.  Keep in mind, the
window being used would be hidden from a user's desktop, but can be
viewed with all sorts of utilities.  (Which is why I destroy the window
in the 1 to 1 process I have setup).

 

Okey dokey, hope someone finds some use for this, I'm off to starting
putting it into my actual application.

 

Drew


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