On Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:29:22 -0600 "Chipp Walters" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Hi Graham,


You can't easily open a doc in an already opened application by
double-clicking on the document, because it will launch another instance of
the application. What you need it 'intra-application communication' for
instance: when the app launches, it checks a temp txt file to see if an
instance of itself is already opened, if it is, then it sends a message to
the other app (via the same text file and/or some sort of polling mechanism)
to open the newly requested file.

There's actually a RunRev user group setup to try and build an OpenSource
implementation of the 'intra-application' protocol and libray...but there's
not much done on it yet.

So, the short answer is it's currently very difficult to do this in Windows.

Here's a tip on "Creating a custom icon for Windows"

http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/RunRev/Tutorials.htm

Chipp, thanks very much for the link. I feel so ignorant about so many things I'm suddenly having to learn about (don't get me started on QT movies!).

I am surprised that a second double-click will create another instance of an application in Windows, because IMHO this behaviour would be counterintuitive for most non-technical PC users, who after all are Msoft's most numerous customers. Indeed, grabbing the first PC I could find (running Office 2000 under Windows 95), I find that Microsoft Word works the way I expected, i.e. double-click on a document will open the app, double-click on a second document, the app acts like you did File/Open from a menu. Of course in MS Office applications, it's legit to have several documents/files open at the same time.

I had no idea that there was an 'intra-application' issue, which I suppose MS Office itself has had to grapple with.

I suppose then my fallback is to design the app to deal with only one document (double-clickable file) at a time - but even with this restriction published to my users, how can I tell if the user has in fact done a second 'unauthorised' double-click and somehow reject it?

Incidentally, since Mac OSX is based on Unix, it seems worth asking if this problem also exists there - I sense that this multiple-instantiation thing is more 'classical' in some sense than the original MacOS solution and therefore likely to exist in Unix too.

TIA for any further info.

Graham
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         Graham Samuel / The Living Fossil Co. / UK & France
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