Introduction to the Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit

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:

• The interface requires precise knowledge of the formatting of dozens of DDE command strings.
• Each operation requires several steps to execute, since the programmer must first obtain ID numbers for each Ecco folder and item referenced.
• 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.
• 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 Toolkit, an ActiveX component which makes it easy for developers to easily and quickly develop applications for Ecco Pro.  Note that, while this component was written using Visual Basic, and designed for use by Visual Basic programmers, it can also be used by any language that will support ActiveX components, including Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript, Visual C++, and many modern scripting languages.

What is Object Oriented Programming?

While a complete discussion of object oriented programming is beyond the scope of this help file, here's an overview to help you get started.

Object-oriented programming is based on objects, which are a program's representation of some thing.  Objects are a type of variable which are identified with a name.  For example, we could think of an object of type Girl, whose name is "Cheryl."

Objects have certain properties which describe their characteristics.  For example, in the case of our object Cheryl,  the property HairColor=Brown, EyeColor=Blue, and Height=64.  Note that some properties are read/write (can be changed by the programmer), while some may be read-only (can only be viewed but cannot be changed).

Objects may also have certain methods, which are actions that the object may carry out.  Cheryl's methods might include Walk, Sit, Sleep, Eat and Talk.  Some methods may require certain parameters that specify how they are to be carried out; e.g. Cheryl.Talk "Hello, world!", Loud.  The parameters will depend on the particular method involved.

Anyone who has programmed in Visual Basic has some familiarity with objects, because Visual Basic forms and controls themselves are objects, which have certain properties and methods.  For example, a form's properties include Height, Width, Top, Left, Visible, etc.

The Visual Basic Ecco Toolkit allows the programmer to create and manipulate four different kinds of objects:

1. EccoApp – the Ecco application itself.  Specify the file displayed; create a new file; activate it; close it; etc.
2. EccoFolder – a folder within Ecco.  Create a new folder, specify its type, add new items, read existing items.
3. EccoItem – a single Ecco item of any type.  Read and write its properties to get or change Ecco data.
4. EccoItems – a collection of Ecco items, e.g. a folder's items, a selection, even all the items in a file.  Use this to search for particular items, to extract a group of items meeting certain criteria, etc.