Notes direct serial communications to Palm devices (Page 4)

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Notes direct serial communications to Palm devices (continued)

Notes: Waits for 12 byte string from Palm in the form "USER.ID!nnnn" where nnnn is the size of the ID in bytes;

Notes: Parses the string to get the size and then waits for that data to be sent;

Notes: Saves the data to a temporary file and switches to it.

The Waba program was written with some classes to handle the Notes serial side and resource management, mostly so I had a framework that could be expanded later to handle extra id's like CERT.ID or later turn it into a data-gathering application. To give an idea of the general style a partial listing of the code is shown below.


//Main method. Tied to Start button

private void startup() {

int n;

byte buf[];

link=new NotesLnk(LINKSPEED);

if (link.isOpen ==false) {

  println("Fatal: Can't open link");

  return;

}

println("Link is open. Waiting to connect..");

if (link.connect('?',60)==true) {

  println("Connected. Sending Id");

  link.writeLine("user.id!"+cat.recSize);

  buf = new byte[cat.recSize];

  cat.readBytes(buf,0,cat.recSize);

  link.writeBytes(buf, 0, cat.recSize);

  println("Id sent");

} else 

  println("Failed to connect.");

link.close();

println("Link is closed."); 

}

For an idea of how this looks on the Palm device, refer to Figure C.

FIGURE C

A screen shot of NotesId in action on the Palm unit.

Some ideas
Hopefully I've given you some ideas here about your Palm device and how easy it is to directly connect it to Notes. The same technology is equally applicable to serial devices, hardware, or terminals which, in turn, allows you to use the powerful Notes features as an intermediary step instead of using the old "text file/import" routine. Here at EML, we're just starting to investigate the practical applications of this idea using A/D systems taking temperature measurements. We're aiming to pull the readings into Notes using this direct technology, use Notes to log the data, manipulate it with an agent, and then send the results somewhere else, in turn, via TCP/IP.

Product availability and resources
The example database includes the LotusScript agents, a script library of the Netlink declarations and the Waba source code for NotesId. It's available from Mark's site at http://www.electricmemo.com/articler.nsf. The Palm executables are also included but note that the USER.ID resource in them is a dummy file.

You''ll need the Waba Beta 7 virtual machine for either a Palm device or a Windows CE device to run the demo. Don't use an earlier beta, it won't work. If you want to bind in a real USER.ID or play with the code you'll need the Beta 7 SDK. You can get both from http://www.wabasoft.com.

Portmon is available at http://www.sysinternals.com.

Pilot VT100 is available http://www.frotz.net/vt100.