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Ecco Professional by NetManage, Inc. is a very powerful personal
information manager well-suited to workgroup use. In particular,
Ecco Pro allows the development of customized applications for importing,
exporting, inspecting and manipulating data as well as controlling the
application programmatically.
The problem has been that Ecco Pro's API uses an obscure interface which
uses DDE (dynamic data exchange) to send and receive data. There
are a number of difficulties with this interface:
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The interface requires precise knowledge of the formatting of dozens of
DDE command strings.
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Each operation requires several steps to execute, since the programmer
must first obtain ID numbers for each Ecco folder and item referenced.
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Since only strings can be passed and received by DDE, data must be converted
between string format and other formats, such as date variants, numeric
values and boolean values.
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String manipulation functions must be written to interpret and process
lists of items.
Because of this complex interface, it is often difficult and time consuming
to program all but the simplest applications for inputting and outputting
data from Ecco Pro.
 Now
there is the Visual Basic Ecco Objects Collection, a powerful set of
tools for Visual Basic 5 developers to easily and quickly develop applications
for Ecco Pro.
The Visual Basic Ecco Objects Collection is a set of class modules
which create an object-oriented interface for accessing Ecco Pro
folders and items.
The Visual Basic Ecco Objects Collection . . .
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Treats each Ecco Pro folder and item as an object with various properties
and methods. For example, reading or setting a telephone number
or an activity date is as simple as
MyItem.Done = Now
Print #1, MyItem.FullName + vbCrlf + "Phone: " + MyItem.BusPhone
If you are familiar with object-oriented programming, you'll find this
interface to be easy and intuitive. If you're not yet familiar with
object-oriented programming, you'll quickly learn how much time and frustration
can be saved when developing applications for Ecco Pro.
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Does away with the need to use the arcane Ecco Pro DDE API syntax.
You do not need to worry about building DDE command strings, converting
data to and from string format, converting returned strings into arrays,
interpreting date strings, etc.
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Adds functions that significantly extend the Ecco Pro DDE API. For
example, with a few lines of code it is possible to take a collection of
items, filter that collection of items based on multiple criteria, and
perform functions on each remaining item in the collection:
Set MyFolder = New EccoFolder
MyFolder.Name = "PhoneBook"
Set MyFriends = MyFolder.Items.Find("Friend = True")
Set MyYoungFriends = MyFriends.Find("Birthday > 1/1/60")
For Each MyItem in MyYoungFriends
Print #1, MyItem.FullName
Print #1, MyItem.HomeAddress
Print #1, MyItem.HomePhone
Print #1
Next
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Reduces from days to hours (or even minutes!) the development and debugging
cycle for Ecco Pro applications. (Included in the downloadable archive
is a demo application which extracts all birthdays in the current Ecco
Pro file meeting specified criteria, e.g. month of the year or year.
This application would have taken hours or even days to build using conventional
DDE API programming tools. This application was written and tested
in only 20 minutes using the Visual Basic Ecco Objects Collection.)
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Emulates the Component Object Model (COM) for accessing the Ecco Pro application
and data. This makes it much easier to develop applications for integrating
Ecco Pro with Microsoft Office, or to develop applications for multiple
platforms (e.g. Ecco Pro and Microsoft Outlook).
The Visual Basic Ecco Objects Collection was developed by Walter
Heindl, an experienced developer of applications for Ecco Pro since the
earliest days of Ecco Pro's external DDE API. He is the author of
Toolkit for Ecco Pro, including the acclaimed
ClipForm data extraction tool, and TimePieces
for Ecco Pro, which includes TimeLine (a tool for managing
related dates) and StopWatch. He now makes his years of experience
in Ecco Pro DDE API programming in Visual Basic available to other developers
through this new development tool.
If you would like more information, then you will want to
download
the evaluation kit, which includes:
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The complete documentation, an Ecco Pro file, which includes a step-by-step
introduction to object-oriented programming with Ecco Pro, with numerous
code examples; a complete technical reference showing all properties and
methods for each object; and information on how to obtain the source code
class modules.
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A sample application complete with source code, showing in practical terms
how much easier it is to develop powerful applications for Ecco Pro using
Visual Basic 5.
You can obtain an individual license to the Visual Basic Ecco Objects
Collection for $29.95. This allows development of applications for
personal use, use by nonprofit organizations, or as shareware (provided
a license to any developed applications is granted to the author).
You can also obtain a commercial license to the Visual Basic
Ecco Objects Collection for $49.95. This allows development of applications
for use in a corporate or government enterprise, or for commercial release.
Note that since this tool consists of source code class modules, you
do not need to distribute the class modules to end-users and do not
need a runtime license for any applications developed.
 Press
here to register the Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit online using
major credit cards.
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