Ok so heres my issue, right now if I have a .dll in the plugins folder I can access the act instance by doing the following:
dim with events actApp as ActApplication
PublicSub OnLoad(ByVal actrunning As Act.UI.ActApplication) Implements Act.UI.IPlugin.OnLoad
actApp = actrunning
EndSub
This allows me to get the current contact and other values I need. My question is how do I get values like current contact from an external application, is it possible to get the current ACT! instance thats open?
This is just a thought. If your external application has your plugin DLL as a reference, you could possibly make your actApp object into a public (read-only) property/instance (in the plugin), so the external application could then use it. Again, just a thought and I have no idea if it'll work or not.
Generally speaking you're going to be working against our application security on this one. Act! API is setup to allow the Act! host to manage 3rd party plugins or controls, access an instance of the framework (not of the currently active application), but outside of these patterns we don't allow a 3rd pty app access to an instance of the application (the framework and application being 2 different things).
There are some limited app functions accessible from outside of the app space e.g. the welcome page exposes some functions to javascript to allow popup from what is essentially a browser form. But these are generally considered internal interfaces and are limited anyway, and likely not particularly useful for customizations purposes.
For really basic app - app integrations you can build a plugin from Act! which serializes or sends contextual data from the App instance to an end point another app can use. e.g. you could write a plugin that pulls the contact ID when on a contact detail view and writes it to a file and have your other app read the file and take the ID and query the framework for the contact record info.
This was something that got a lot of attention when ACT! 2005 first came out because it was supported out of the box in ACT! 6.0.
The short answer is that you'll have to make a plugin which can give you this information. Like Allen said, you could write it to a file, use .NET remoting, maybe do some sort of shared memory trickery, write it into a SQL server somewhere, or any number of other things, but ACT! itself isn't going to help you.
Personally, I've played with .NET remoting to do this in the past, and it works, but it's a *lot* of work to get going. It also requires great care to prevent messing up the ActApplication instance.
Thanks for the replies and ideas. I don't see any issues in using remoting or MSMQ to get this to work. I also would like to run the windows reports from a framework app. Are these reports anywhere that I can get at them through a separate app?
