RE: Using interfaces to alleviate supplier plan visibilityproblems

Question

Martin,
I presented a similar topic at Forum98, and this year I will be expanding on
the concept to talk about interchangeability of components. Breaking
supplier plan dependencies is only one of the reasons to implement a similar
strategy.
The short answer to your question is that you define the method signatures
and virtual attributes in the interface, which serves as a supplier to your
project and to the implementation. Then at run-time, you dynamically load
the library containing the appropriate implementation. The only supplier
dependencies are the actual interface definitions, which carry no baggage
with them.
This solution works for most situations, but there are a couple of instances
where it gets a little more complicated. Most notably, Forte does not allow
dynamic loading of a library that uses a Service object. For that, you must
use the Forte name service and bind to a proxy class at run-time. The proxy
class can be pretty much a do-nothing class, since it will be replaced at
run-time, but Forte will not bind to the interface itself.
I hope this helps - If you have any other questions, let me know.
Jeanne
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[<a href="mailto:[email protected]">mailto:[email protected]]On</a> Behalf Of Martin G Nystrom
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 4:13 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Using interfaces to alleviate supplier plan visibility problems
At FORUM97, someone from Born presented a paper on how to use interfaces to
get around problems with supplier plan setups that restrict visibility.
Does
anyone have this presentation or can offer any pointers?
-martin
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Answer 1

Jeanne Hesler wrote:
>
The work-around was to include the c library as a supplier to the
project that will be using it. It's a little ugly, but it works. In
your case, you would need to include both libraries. It should not
cause platform problems, because even though it is a supplier, it will
not actually get loaded until you ask for it, and you will only ask for
the right one for the platform you are on. Just be sure that what you
include as a supplier is a library, and not a source project.Thank you so much! I tried this out last night and it works great! The
only downside is that at deployment time, Forte will require the C
library to be installed even on the platforms that don't support it, but
that's a small price to pay for the benefits we're getting. And maybe
someday Forte will fix the bug. :) Again, thanks for your help.
You should be able to use FindLibrary to load a dll, because that's what
you would be doing if you were using compiled libraries.I don't actually need to do this now, but I did figure out what I was
doing wrong when I tried this yesterday. Our DLL name was slightly
different from the name of the project directory, but I had it coded as
if it were the same. So of course Forte couldn't find the library to
load. Also, Forte apparently looks first for the compiled library and
then for the interpreted library, so when I was getting the error
message, the error message referred to the name of the interpreted
library and I assumed that's all it had looked for. Sure helps when you
spell things right!
Dale
=================================
Dale V. Georg
Senior Systems Analyst
Indus Consultancy Services
[email protected]
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