Reading and writing a local drive

Acmedia,

ATGUIOPENDIALOG is only for getting the location or file name of a file on the client machine. This isually a file that you are going to write to from the host, or transfer the data from the file to the host. It is not meant to provide client read/write access from Pick BASIC.

If you want to manipulate the data in Pick you will have to transfer it to the Pick Host with some transfer scripting, write code to do your manipulations and place the results into an array or PICK host file and then write the script to transfer that array or file back to the client PC.

Unless you just want to rename the file or do some super simple client side manipulations then you need to write a script to transfer a batch file to do your copy or renaming or other client side processing.

I guess it would be easier to answer your questions if you would please provide more details in what you are trying to accomplish.

Hope this helps,

Deech

Acmedia,

Okay here's broad outline, I will post some code when I get a chance.

1.) Use ATGUIOPENDIALOG to get the name of the file you want to put into the text window.

2.) Write an execute statement to run FT with the appropriate parameters including the name of the file you got using the ATGUIOPENDIALOG command. Transfer the item to some kind of scratch file on the PICK host.

3.) Read the item from the scratch file into the PICK program and place its data into the multi-line edit control.

4.) User clicks the save button, GUI program writes the changes back to the scratch file and then pops up the ATGUISAVEDIALOG and gets the file name from the user.

5.) Using an EXECUTE statement with the file name from the user you again use accuterm FT to transfer the modified host item back to the client machine.

Done. Please consult the help files or the File Transfer forum for more specific help on scripting FT.

Hope this helps,

Deech

Acmedia,

Now come to think of it, there maybe a way to work with the Accuterm Client-side VBA scripting language that can do this a bit more effeciently, without having to use FT to tranfer the file to the host.

This would require knowing a bit about the Accuterm VBA Scripting language and being able to "Pick up" variables from that environment to a program running on the MV host. This is basically how the AT GUI environment works.

Actually, now that I look at what I wrote, it's probably not a bad idea to investigate that and give it a try. But that would be slightly off topic for this forum and probably better asked and answered in the Scripting & Automation forum.

I should have added that to write the file back out you would use the closeseq function.

acmedia wrote: So it looks like writing an mp3 tag editor in UniVerse is going to be a tricky thing :)

Universe probably has the same functionality as QM in that respect. Are the tag files text only?

We're getting away from AccuTerm here but for the curious:

ID3v1 holds the data in 128 bytes at the end of a file, and starts with "TAG". One field uses a byte value, the rest are ASCII

ID3v1.1 is a slight alteration, it's the same size but one of the fields is reduced by a character to allow for another byte field.

But then came ID3v2 (.2, .3, .4) and everything changed - it's not fixed length, it's at the start of the file, and it can include all forms of data. A guide to the ID3 tag is at http://www.id3.org/

Probably using VB to read the tags, then dumping a flat file into the MV environment for processing would be the way to go.

Deech,

I think that Acmedia meant that we were moving the topic away from Accuterm and more towards mp3 tags.

Yes, it's the thread that's going away from AccuTerm, not the company - and the mp3 tags was a top of the head example about files that aren't text [though now that I've thought of it I like the idea of setting up a mv database for them].

Thanks for pointing that out Larry. I hadn't really thought of that when making my example. In my case, the database resides on the computer that I usually work on.