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I am starting the task of moving a purchase order application from a
clumsy Microsoft Access platform to a nice Rails/SQL Server platform.
Obviously this is all involving a Win32 environment. Since there are a
lot of sharp minds in this group I was wondering what y'all thought
would be best in terms on integration strategy.

Currently a new P.O. that's entered in the system is printed out of
Microsoft Access to a fax printer driver, where the recicpient's
details are then manually chosen from the fax software's phonebook as
part of the Send Fax dialog. With the new application I would like a
Rails form to automatically fax the P.O. to the recipient. The
recipient's details are stored in the SQL tables so I could pull things
like the name, fax number, phone number, etc. programmatically.

Here's where I would like an opinion. Would it be simplest/best to
implement a Win32 DDE solution to accomplish this? This option would
require me hooking into the fax software application, which might be
daunting task for someone of my coding caliber

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On 20 Apr 2005, at 06:54, gregarican wrote:

> Currently a new P.O. that's entered in the system is printed out of
> Microsoft Access to a fax printer driver, where the recicpient's
> details are then manually chosen from the fax software's phonebook as
> part of the Send Fax dialog. With the new application I would like a
> Rails form to automatically fax the P.O. to the recipient. The
> recipient's details are stored in the SQL tables so I could pull things
> like the name, fax number, phone number, etc. programmatically.
>
> Here's where I would like an opinion. Would it be simplest/best to
> implement a Win32 DDE solution to accomplish this? This option would
> require me hooking into the fax software application, which might be
> daunting task for someone of my coding caliber

I would be very surprised if you couldn't do this from WIN32OLE, since
you can do it from Access. If you have the VB for this it should be a
boring but otherwise easy job of porting the VB to Ruby, provided you
know where to look for which applications.

--
Eric Hodel - - http://segment7.net
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Eric Hodel wrote:

>I would be very surprised if you couldn't do this from WIN32OLE, since

>you can do it from Access. If you have the VB for this it should be a

>boring but otherwise easy job of porting the VB to Ruby, provided you
>know where to look for which applications.

I know how to user WIN32OLE to invoke applications and whatnot, but I
was wondering about the data exchange. When the fax application is
brought up through the completion of the fax printer selection the
recipient's name, fax number, etc. all have to be specified from the
fax software's phone book. What I want to do is pull the Rails vendor
details to automatically populate this information where the enduser
just has to click on Send Fax and away they go.

Let me say first off that I LOVE Rails. I have been working with Ruby
for about 6 months now and cannot imagine choosing to use another
language unless I had to out of business rules and necessity. I have
had to use everything from C++ to Java to VB and wouldn't want to
switch back unless I had no other choice. And Rails will only help
further the attention and notoriety that Ruby should be getting. Some
folks think that Rails might overshadow Ruby but I think it will only
bring people into the language. Since once they start using it and see
how easy it makes things they will start looking 'under the hood' and
discover Ruby's practicality and effectiveness.

I am still working through the Rails implementation of the P.O.
application so I won't be near the DDE stuff until the end of things.
We'll see how it goes!