I want to display a dialog box in a shared library. But it seems to me that Palm OS cannot do this; it always looks for resources in the calling app's .prc database. Am I missing something here? (I can't create a new form at run-time because there is a scroll bar which cannot be created on-the-fly. And there are graphic buttons too. So I have to put the dialog in the resource.)
The shared library should "DmOpenDatabase" itself first to put it's resource database in the search list. Leaving it in the resource search chain all the time could lead to unexpected results if a program had its resources hidden by a library's.
Seems like shared libraries, in Palm's mind, are meant for doing some silent operations. User interface of any kind, including error messages, are not welcome. Unless there is a strong architectural reason for such limit, otherwise I think such design greatly restricts what the OS can do. Like plug-ins can be difficult to do for Palm OS. Windows DLLs do not have such limitation. Why!!??
Palm OS was designed for slow devices with 128K of RAM and no memory manager. Palm OS shared libraries are just chunks of code with some OS support for remembering a dispatch table. Windows DLLs are basically the same thing as Windows programs, just without a WinMain.
This is changing. In Palm OS Cobalt Protein programming, there is no difference between a shared library and an application -- an application just has a standard entry point that can be called when it's launched.
-- Ben Combee, senior DTS engineer, PalmSource, Inc. Read "Combee on Palm OS" at http://palmos.combee.net/
-- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
