JerryB

I'm developing an ActiveX "server" application that will read and write information to a industrial controller over the serial port. I have created methods that read and write the data, when requested. My question is how can I let users "bind" to a piece of data in the control ? I want the user to be able to put a label on a form and have that label automatically update and display the requested data from the control (without using a timer control in the user app).
We have an existing DDE server app which works fine but no one wants to use DDE anymore. With the DDE Server, I can set the "LinkTopic", LInkItem and LinkMode of a label and it will always refresh the label with new data.

blink

Hard to tell how you have the components laid out here, but assuming your "Server" is a Com object, you can invoke it from another application and just fire events back to the host app. Declare the server WithEvents, and then handle the "OnDataChanged" or whatever you want to call it.

If the server needs to run out-of-process, and perhaps is invoked seprately from the app with your label control, you'll need to get the handle of the listening app from your server and use callbacks to invoke functions in the listener.

Just a couple of ideas.

BLink

JerryB

Thanks for the ideas. It will be an out of process server and the only thing I could think of was to use callbacks but I wanted to see if I was missing anything.