Dar Scott wrote: > > On Tuesday, December 3, 2002, at 11:27 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote: > >> By directory polling, do you mean checking the existence of a file >> rather >> than its contents? That's the approach I took, much faster than always >> accessing the file. > > Cool! I would guess that would avoid locking problems, too. (Let's > see; scribble under Gaskin in the rollodex, "file-based IPC expert".)
I don't know how much of an expert one can be on something this relatively simple, but maybe Ken and I can earn that title by beefing things up a bit: While he and I were brainstorming over this last night, he suggested the basic method could be extended for use between instances of the same app to more gracefully handle a double-clicked file: When the app first opens it leave a file in the temp folder which acts as an "is running" flag. If a document is double-clicked, a second instance of the app is launched, and on startup (before it's even visible) it checks the "is running" file and if it's there it writes the global $1 to a communication file and exits. The first instance, still polling, sees the communcation file and opens the file it references before deleting the temp communication file. I'm reluctant to roll out such an approach for all my apps, as even a %0.05 performance degradation adds up (maybe far less; I was benchmarking file existence on a slow PII while my P4 gets fixed), but when you really need it it seems maybe a small price to pay. -- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Media Corporation Developer of WebMerge 2.1: Publish any database on any site ___________________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.FourthWorld.com Tel: 323-225-3717 AIM: FourthWorldInc _______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
