Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Using alpha as front end to another program

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Using alpha as front end to another program

    I have another program that I use frequently, but the reporting capabilities are limited. It does however, have a feature that allows exporting the data to a dbf or text file. I was wondering whether I could write a little app in alpha that would start the other program, select their export utility from their menu, and then I could manipulate the resulting data file via usual ways in alpha. Is this reasonable?
    Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.


    #2
    RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

    Gary:
    You might be able to use "SYS_OPEN". It is a new feature offered in 4.5 build 266. Checkout the readme file on B266 in technical support area.
    Jim

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

      Gary;
      While Alpha may allow you to start a different program, it cannot really control the other programs.

      To have total over another program, you might want to try a specialty program that was made just for this purpose.

      Check out WinBatch at: http://www.windowware.com/winware/index-goto.html

      Regards,
      --Bob

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

        Gary,
        We use alpha to fire off a number of different programs. Look at your x-basic guide and check out the DDE functions. They are VERY powerful. You can manipulate date to be used in other programs, send commands to those programs, etc. Sometimes the commands can seem strange, but once you get the format down, the commands work wonderfully. We use Alpha to populate a word template and then tell word to print the document. Alpha would have been too cumbersome to print the 6000 or so two-sided documents. In another instance, we call a communications program and pass information to it to retrieve informtion from external mainframe systems. I will just reiterate, DDE IS VERY POWERFUL!!!

        Tom

        Comment


          #5
          RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

          Thanks for the comments - I will try these ideas ...

          Gary
          Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.

          Comment


            #6
            RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

            Gary:

            alpha has the ability to export files in many formats. In addition if they need a dbf format just give them a copy of the dbf you want to provide.

            I hope this helps

            bob adler

            Comment


              #7
              RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

              The problem is not in exporting from alpha, but importing from another software program into alpha. The other program is not written in alpha and uses a data file that is propietary - and the producers of that software will not divulge the format. However, they do include withinb their software a utility that will export the data from THEIR program to a txt, dbf, etc format. I can then take that and use it within alpha. I know that. What I would like to know though is there a way to automate the process - i.e., write an alpha app that can start the other program, run its utility (which is a menu choice), exporting the data to a dbf file - so that I can then import into malpha - I think you get the idea ...

              Gary
              Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.

              Comment


                #8
                RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

                Gary, here is a sample of our code to do the word prints.

                The toughest part is trying to find out what the commandstrings look like. That took us quite a while to figure out. We had to research in a Visual Basic book to get the proper format.

                sys_shell("c:WINOFFICEwinword.exe")
                link = dde_initiate("winword", "system")
                command_string = "[fileopen "p:clericalformsnewsletterNewsletter.dot"]"
                dde_execute(link,command_string)
                link = dde_initiate("winword", ""p:clericalformsnewsletterNewsletter.dot"")

                WHILE .not.fetch_eof(dbh)
                if .T. THEN
                case1 = master5->caseno + " " + master5->supervisor + master5->workerno
                name = w_upper(trim(master5->fname)+" "+trim(master5->lname))
                if .not.isblank("master5->xtraaddind") then
                Addr = w_upper(trim(master5->mailstreet))+", "+w_upper(trim(master5->xtraaddref))
                else
                Addr = w_upper(trim(master5->mailstreet))
                end if
                if len(trim(master5->mailzip))>5 then
                zipper = left(master5->mailzip,5)+"-"+right(master5->mailzip,4)
                else
                zipper = trim(master5->mailzip)
                end if
                addr2 = trim(master5->Mailctysta)+" "+zipper
                dde_poke(link,"CASE",case1)
                dde_poke(link,"NAME",name)
                dde_poke(link,"ADDR1",addr)
                dde_poke(link,"ADDR2",addr2)
                command_string = "[FILEPRINT]"
                dde_execute(link,command_string)
                FOR i = 1 to 5100
                trace(ltrim(str(i))+"/5100")
                NEXT i
                counter = counter+1
                ELSE
                END IF
                fetch_next(dbh)
                END WHILE
                quitit:
                UI_MSG_BOX("BCBSS NEWSLETTERS","Printing is COMPLETE - "+str(counter,7,0)+ " Pages")
                command_string = "[FILEEXIT]"
                dde_execute(link,command_string)
                dde_terminate(link)
                theend:
                'debug(0)


                Hope this helps. By the way, this is version 1.02. We have not yet been able to upgrae to ver 4.

                Tomend

                Comment


                  #9
                  RE: Using alpha as front end to another program

                  WOW ... I appreciate the code and will study it closely. Thanks ...
                  Gary S. Traub, Ph.D.

                  Comment

                  Working...
                  X