Making a Progress function call from .net (or alternative)

Drammy

Drammy

Member
Hi all,

I have a situation where I am faced with rewriting/translating a particularly nasty piece of Progress 4GL into T-SQL or .net

Before I undertake this task I would like to investigate means of exposing the existing function so that I execute it from VBScript or .net...


Anyone got any ideas around the most straight forward/simplest way to do this?


Thanks,
Drammy
 
Is this local or remote? The usual approach to exposing a Progress app to .NET or other clients is through AppServer. The obvious alternative is Sonic. If this is a same machine one-off and you don't want to commit to either of those two technologies, then I would suggest connecting through a socket.
 
Thanks for the reply tamhas, It is remote and a one off same machine type solution where I would prefer to avoid Sonic or the appserver. Would you mind giving further details of the socket approach? Or perhaps point me in the right direction as this is fairly new ground to me... Cheers, Drammy
 
There are bad examples of how to write a socket client or socket server in the docs ... sorry that I don't know where to point you for some good examples except posts by Greg Higgins on the PEG, which are unfortunately still not searchable, nor has he published the book on same which he said he was writing. It has been a while since I wrote one of these, so I don't immediate recall any specific guidance that I would give you except to keep your thinking focused on it being an event-driven problem and to make sure that you build in a lot of checks and error tests.

Other than that, it is conceptually pretty simple. The server end simply sets itself up and waits for a connection and the client end makes that connection and thus initiates a conversation. You need to work out a messaging protocol for what you want to send back and forth, including some messages for "I didn't get that, can you tell me again". But, I have found it something that can be highly reliable.
 
tamhas said:
There are bad examples of how to write a socket client or socket server in the docs ... sorry that I don't know where to point you for some good examples except posts by Greg Higgins on the PEG, which are unfortunately still not searchable, nor has he published the book on same which he said he was writing. It has been a while since I wrote one of these, so I don't immediate recall any specific guidance that I would give you except to keep your thinking focused on it being an event-driven problem and to make sure that you build in a lot of checks and error tests.

Other than that, it is conceptually pretty simple. The server end simply sets itself up and waits for a connection and the client end makes that connection and thus initiates a conversation. You need to work out a messaging protocol for what you want to send back and forth, including some messages for "I didn't get that, can you tell me again". But, I have found it something that can be highly reliable.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the "food for thought". I'll follow some of those ideas up...
 
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