Thank you so very much Razzak. Most of us become reflective at this time of the year and I can sincerely say one of the most fulfilling things I have received in my life is the appreciation expressed by you personally, your staff, and by many, many members of the RBase community.
You know that I enjoy helping when I can, and hope I am able to be worthy for some time to come. Mike ----- Original Message ----- From: "A. Razzak Memon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "RBASE-L Mailing List" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, December 17, 2007 8:08 PM Subject: [RBASE-L] - Mike Byerley's Gift to the R:BASE Community > > R:Folks, > > What a wonderful way to unveil an un-documented feature of R:BASE 7.6, C/S:I > 7.6 and Turbo V-8 for Windows. > > Mike, thanks for your perseverance, and your untiring and countless efforts, > to work with the members of R:Dream Team to implement this very cool feature > in R:BASE. > > I sincerely appreciate all you do for R:BASE Technologies and the R:BASE > Community. > > May every current user of R:BASE find this useful! > > Very Best R:egards, > > Razzak. > > P.S. > Now that the cat is out of the bag, more technical documents and sample > applications will be available soon. > > ================================================================================ > Originally posted by Mike Byerley on RBG7-L list 06:49 PM 12/17/2007 > ================================================================================ > > Razzak is giving you this Christmas present a little early. I did a > demonstration of this at the Conference and some of the code is on the Zip > Drive everyone got, but in the short time (I know Bill, I ran over a little > bit) available, l was not able to get into the meat of what RBTI has done to > expand the power of RBase even further. > > There are hundreds of times the things come up just as Jeffrey and Javier had > today. > > Even though they seemed like desparate issues, they had a commonality in how > to > get from RBase to another source in a seamless fashion. > > Just for simplicity here, I am going to show Jeffrey how to solve his issue > easily and painlessly, as RBTI has done the pain part already by bearing with > me for the past year to make this kind of stuff a reality. > > There is a Windows API function GetEnvironmentVariable that returns the value > of the variable requested. If you work in Windows, you will use the > definitive > resource on the planet for Windows, the MSDN Library. > http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx > > so here is the Code for this issue only. It will require a longer technical > paper to describe exactly what and how a bit protracted for an email. When > that is ready, we'll first put it up at RBTI DEV resources, then the help > files. In a nutshell, we can Load external DLLs once in code and then call > functions from them after declaring them just ONCE in the session, just as if > they were a part of RBase. That part will be in the technical paper. If the > function is a part of the Windows API, and the arguments and return values > are > of the same structure (byte) as RBase datatypes, the API can be used without > Loading, since ALL the Windows API is already running as part of the OS. We > only need to DECLARE it once in the RBase Session. The only caveat is that > the > ORDER of the arguments to a function are REVERSED because the technology > employed reads the arguments off the STACK in a LastInFirstOut order So the > Declaration for the function mentioned above will look like this: > > STDCALL function 'GetEnvironmentVariableA' alias 'GetEnvironmentVariable' + > (integer, ptr text, ptr text) : integer > > and the standard C++ declaration looks like this: > > DWORD WINAPI GetEnvironmentVariable( > __in_opt LPCTSTR lpName, > __out_opt LPTSTR lpBuffer, > __in DWORD nSize > ); > > This declaration should be in a Startup location as is appropriate to your > application. You can declare as many as you like, but don't declare any you > are not going to use. > > I'm not going to explain the "ALIAS" or the PTR or any of that stuff in this > missive. That will be in the technical paper. This is just to show you what > you have available to you in 7.6 and 8.0 TODAY... > > Then in the application do the following: > > SET VAR vret INTEGER = 0 > SET VAR vin TEXT = 'path' > SET VAR vout TEXT = '' > SET VAR vsize INTEGER = 1499 > > SET VAR vret = (dlcall('Kernel32', 'GetEnvironmentVariableA', vsize, vout, > vin)) > > the vOUT variable will now contain the value of the enironment variable > described in vIN and vRet has the length of the string. We have to set vSize > to some size great enough to hold the returned string. It hurts nothing to > set > it to the RBase max size for TEXT. > > Notice that the Calling Keyword "DLCall" is the new RBase function to make it > work and further that the order of the arguments is reversed from the C++ > example above. > > Also, ANY of these functions that are declared this way can be used in > expressions and in database commands INLINE just like normal RBase functions. > There is no penalty like RBGUDF.exe. > > I thank RBTI, Razzak, Alex, and Alexsey for tolerating me to help bring this > to > reality. > > That's all for Today.. Merry Christmas to Jeffrey and of course to all. I > have > a little time available so it won't be too long for an in depth examination > and > explanation of this along with examples. > > In the examples, I will try to show how I accidentally stumbled onto how to > do > Ole Automation Line By Line with one little helper DLL. > ================================================================================ > > >
