The predicates in this section deal with MS-Windows‘Dynamic Data Exchange' or DDE protocol.163This interface is contributed by Don Dwiggins. A Windows DDE conversation is a form of interprocess communication based on sending reserved window events between the communicating processes.
Failing DDE operations raise an error of the structure below, where Operation is the name of the (partial) operation that failed and Message is a translation of the operator error code. For some errors, Context provides additional comments.
error(dde_error(Operation, Message), Context)
The DDE client interface allows Prolog to talk to DDE server programs. We will demonstrate the use of the DDE interface using the Windows PROGMAN (Program Manager) application:
1 ?- open_dde_conversation(progman, progman, C).
C = 0
2 ?- dde_request(0, groups, X)
--> Unifies X with description of groups
3 ?- dde_execute(0, '[CreateGroup("DDE Demo")]').
true.
4 ?- close_dde_conversation(0).
true.
For details on interacting with progman, use the SDK online
manual section on the Shell DDE interface. See also the Prolog
library(progman), which may be used to write simple Windows
setup scripts in Prolog.
CF_TEXT
data in DDE parlance) representing that data, if the request is
successful.POKE command to the server on the specified Item.
command is passed as data of type CF_TEXT.
The library(dde) defines primitives to realise simple
DDE server applications in SWI-Prolog. These features are provided as of
version 2.0.6 and should be regarded as prototypes. The C part of the
DDE server can handle some more primitives, so if you need features not
provided by this interface, please study library(dde).
execute
requests from other applications. To register a service for a DDE
request, Template is of the form:
+Service(+Topic, +Item, +Value)Service is the name of the DDE service provided (like progman in the client example above). Topic is either an atom, indicating Goal only handles requests on this topic, or a variable that also appears in Goal. Item and Value are variables that also appear in Goal. Item represents the request data as a Prolog atom.164Up to version 3.4.5 this was a list of character codes. As recent versions have atom garbage collection there is no need for this anymore.
The example below registers the Prolog current_prolog_flag/2 predicate to be accessible from other applications. The request may be given from the same Prolog as well as from another application.
?- dde_register_service(prolog(current_prolog_flag, F, V),
current_prolog_flag(F, V)).
?- open_dde_conversation(prolog, current_prolog_flag, Handle),
dde_request(Handle, home, Home),
close_dde_conversation(Handle).
Home = '/usr/local/lib/pl-2.0.6/'
Handling DDE execute requests is very similar. In this
case the template is of the form:
+Service(+Topic, +Item)
Passing a Value argument is not needed as execute
requests either succeed or fail. If Goal fails, a‘not
processed' is passed back to the caller of the DDE request.