Re: About lauching files on Win98

[John English <je@bton.ac.uk>]

"Beard, Frank" wrote:
> 
> St�phane,
> 
> The simplest way to launch the program from the application is to use
> the WinExec API.  It has been superceded by the more complicated
> CreateProcess API, but I doubt if it will go away any time soon,
> if ever.
> 
> Depending on your Windows API binding (we are using Aonix which I
> think uses Intermetrics' binding), it will look something like:
> 
>       command : string := "iexplore.exe help.html" & ASCII.NUL;

I beg to differ. It is better to start the default browser using
ShellExecute than to assume the user has IE installed and that
the installation directory is in the user's path.

To use ShellExecute via the Win32 binding, try something like this
(not tested!):

  Win32.WinDef.HINSTANCE hInst :=
    Win32.ShellAPI.ShellExecute(
      System.Null_Address,                   -- no parent window
      To_LPCSTR("open" & ASCII.NUL),         -- command
      To_LPCSTR("c:\help.html" & ASCII.NUL), -- file to open
      System.Null_Address,                   -- no parameters
      System.Null_Address,                   -- no default directory
      Win32.WinUser.SW_SHOWNORMAL            -- show window normally
    );

The return value is a handle to the instance of the application that
was started (or a value <= 32 if an error occurred, but you'll need
to do an Unchecked_Conversion from Win32.WinDef.HINSTANCE, which is
basically a System.Address, to an Integer to check for this).

HTH,

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