Posted by Jim Guerber on November 12, 2010 at 10:42:16:
Changes
We heard you in the meeting, and have been busy making the changes to Comet32 that you asked for. Here is a list of changes we have made recently.
These changes will be incorporated in release 422 which should be available today.
Background:
You said you really needed some background capability. Well, we have done it! We have implemented the activate verb (with some restrictions).
Activate will start a program in the next available partition. If a partition is specified in the first parameter of the activate, it will be ignored.
The system variables, DABS, and Common variables are passed to the activated program.
The name of the partition activated will be returned in the system variable SYSPART$.
The background partition will get the partition name of the partition that started it in its SYSPART$.
A background program will end when it executes a STOP statement. The Partition will be destroyed, and become available for the next activate.
In the future (possibly soon), we will implement some form of inter partition communication.
TERMINATE, KILL and PCOMM() will not be implemented. PSTAT has been implemented.
All background partitions will have the system driver (X00) automatically opened on lun 0. A close of this lun will be ignored. X00 functionality has been greatly enhanced.
The Msgbox statement and the Msgbox function are supported in background programs. The Msgbox dialog will appear on the main comet screen.
Greatly expanded system driver Capabiities (X00)
As stated above, the system driver is automatically open on LUN 0 for every background partition. It may also be opened on any other LUN for other programs such as XAP.
We have added virtually ALL of the file functions normally available on LUN 0 to the System Driver. These functions usually deal with full windows path names.
CopyFile
EraseFile
RenameFile
FileStatus
FindFirstFile
FindNextFile
GetDirAlias
SetDirAlias
OpenClipboard
QueryClipBoard
CopyToClipboard
CopyFromClipboard
CloseClipboard
ShellExecute
ShellExecuteWait
GetOSInfo
GetSystemTime
The system driver also supports a much expanded buffering capability:
This is like the # buffer, only more.
You can use the file statement to set csv or xml modes. The statement "file(LUN)normal" will reset any csv or xml mode currently set.
The buffer size is virtually unlimited.
Writes to X00 will append data to the buffer
Reads of X00 will retrieve the whole contents of the buffer
The new mnemonic (clearbuffer) will clear the buffer.
All file commands listed above will also replace the contents of the buffer with their results.
Each file can be a maximum of 1MB in length Uploaded files will be purged from the server on a regular basis.