Advantages of the Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit

The Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit . . .

• Makes programming easier and more intuitive by treating 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.  (It's very similar to how Visual Basic treats forms and controls.)  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.

• 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.  For example, the Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit extracts dates as dates – making them much easier to compare and format in your application, than if you had to read and interpret the date strings returned by the Ecco Pro DDE interface.

• 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

• 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.)

• 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).

• Makes it possible to do a number of things which cannot be done using conventional programming of the Ecco interface. You can create a collection of items consisting of items which have been filtered using multiple criteria. For example, you can create a collection of persons listed in the PhoneBook having a birthday later than 1970, who are also contained in a mailing list folder. You can then find out how many items are in this collection, and iterate through the collection to create a list.

• Is an ActiveX component which can be used not only by Visual Basic programmers, but also by programmers using other languages (e.g. VBScript, VBA, Visual C++) which support the use of ActiveX components and COM automation.

• Supports user registration . . . you can (1) require a unique user ID and user name, (2) create time-limited applications, or (3) create applications which require a password.