WindowsEnabler internal

WindowsEnabler uses Windows API's to execute programs and work with documents. The obvious advantage of this method is that WindowsEnabler can work with all programs and document types that can be handled through these API's. These same programs and document types are properly recognized in the Windows explorer.

This method also has some disadvantages:

• The same WindowsEnabler request might not have the same result on every machine. If, for example, you request to open a document with the extension "html", the document could be opened in the Internet Explorer on the first machine, in Netscape Navigator on a second machine and in an html editor on a third machine. This all depends on the applications installed on the machine. In addition, programs that are in different locations on different machine or that have different settings on different machine can cause unexpected results.
• A second disadvantage is that WindowsEnabler has no more control over the documents than the control offered by the API's, which is almost nothing. It is neither possible to open a document and wait until it is closed or saved by the user, nor to 'catch' the operations that a user performs on this document and send these as messages to the host.

If you would like to achieve such effects in an interactive environment, you will have to write Windows programs that give you this control and/or send messages to the host. You can then use host to start these programs.

If you want to have this type of control in a batch environment there is another product called ITP/Document Services. ITP/Document Services allows you to write scripts that perform several operations on a single document. In these scripts, you have facilities for elaborate logging and error handling. ITP/Document Services is the natural upgrade from WindowsEnabler for use in batch environments.