HP 3000 Manuals HP 3000 Manuals
Some Ideas of How you Could use Application Data Passing
Here are some ideas of what the HP Desk Application Data Passing
mechanism can be used for:
* You have an application which your users stay in all day.
Occasionally, they would like to send messages and read their HP
Desk mail.
If you run your application under HP Desk, Application Data
Passing allows the application to suspend so that users can do
whatever they wish in HP Desk. When the user presses Resume, the
application is reactivated.
* You have a filing product running on the HP 3000 in which you
store your documents.
Application Data Passing allows documents created within HP Desk
or arriving as part of an incoming message to be filed in this
filing system. Users can also retrieve documents from the system
and bring them into HP Desk, so that they can be mailed to other
HP Desk users.
* You have a financial application that requires users to perform
some complicated tasks.
By using Application Data Passing, the application can access the
HP Desk Help subsystem to display pages of Help text on the users'
screens. You write the help text and install it into the HP Desk
help system. The application can reference the text by page
number. You do not have to design and implement your own Help
system.
* You use the HP Desk forms collection facility (ACK 6) to send out
a survey to HP Desk users. Replies to the survey are collected
together by HP Desk as a Forms Package.
Application Data Passing allows an application to process each
data file in the Forms Package in turn so that the survey replies
can be collated and analyzed.
* You have a large number of documents which are currently stored as
MPE files. You want them transferred into HP File/Library.
Application Data Passing enables an application to pass each file
into Catalogs in the Library, specifying keywords and comments if
you wish.
* You want to print a forms batch file but the print command does
not allow you to specify forms packages or forms data files.
Write a simple application that uses Interrupt Mode 12 to get the
V/3000 form file (since it will always be the first item). Then
use Mode 7 to initialize access to the batch data files followed
by Mode 8 to loop around and get the individual batch files. For
each batch file the MPE intrinsics VOPENBATCH, VREADBATCH,
VPRINTBATCH and VCLOSEBATCH provide a simple way of printing each
screen.
* You want to merge two text items in your Work Area.
Use Interrupt Mode 12 to find the two items, create a file
containing them both and return it to your Work Area using Mode 4.
Alternatively, Mode 2 will allow you to return it to any area.