Memory Services, maintaining context

Question

In an external function I must allocate a lot of memory ( could be megabytes ) during the first invocation of the function. During following invocations the information stored in the memory that was allocated is used to calculate the return value of the function. During the last invocation the memory must be freed.
How can I do that ?
Can I use the OCIMemoryAlloc functions for external functions ? How is the allocated memory maintained from call to call.
I know that there is the external indexing feature described in the Data Cartridge developers guide. But this is not what I want to do. I want to write a simple external function that allocates memory during the first invocation and frees the memory during the last invocation.

Answer 1

To find out what it wrong with the way the service works, you could experiment by creating a "Look up in Dictionary" service yourself. I tried the following:
Open Automator.
Create a new service set to "Service receives Text in any Appication"
and added a Text Action "Get Definition of Word", that will create a list of definitions.
To present the results I added "Speak Text", you could change that for "create text file" or "copy to clip board" or something else.
Once you save this file to a name of your choosing the service will be installed in your user library and be available in the contextual menu of the Application you selected in the "service receives..." line.
HTH
Léonie