Chapter 4: HELPER APPLICATIONS

For a really professional looking result we need to get rid of that DOS box! Unfortunately there's no way to do this without a special purpose helper application. Since not everyone has a programmer in their back pocket, we've done the hard work for you and created a couple of free utilities you can use to add some polish to your Flash applications.

The first utility is called INVOKE. It works on all Windows platforms and banishes the DOS box completely. You call it the same way you would have used DOSTART.BAT and INVOKE does all the work that START would have done to open the file you specify.

usage: invoke.exe action filespec

The action argument describes an operation to be performed on the specified file. If the action you use is not defined for the select file or folder, INVOKE will fail silently. Case is not important.

The filespec can be a relative or fully qualified path to a file, folder and even a URL. If the specified file or folder can't be found, INVOKE will fail silently. A bad URL will still cause a browser window to be opened (and stay open). Case is not important (but might be significant in URLs).

The available actions you can use vary according to the file type. Some common operations available include open, explore (only for folders), print, install and edit. You can find out what actions are supported for files on your system by looking at the File Types tab under Tools | Folder Options in Explorer. Below is an example of what you might find if you lookup up the actions for the PDF file type.

The following fscommand will open file.pdf in the default application for PDF files. If no application is registered to handle PDF file, or the open action is not supported for PDF files, INVOKE will fail silently.

fscommand("EXEC", "invoke.exe" + chr(9) + "open" + chr(9) + "file.pdf")

The following syntax will send file.txt to the currently selected printer using the default application for TXT files (Notepad on most systems). This is equivalent to calling notepad.exe /p file.txt (for text files). If no application is registered to handle the print action for TXT files, INVOKE will fail silently.

fscommand("EXEC", "invoke.exe" + chr(9) + "print" + chr(9) + "file.txt")

The following syntax will open a browser window at www.northcode.com. This is an alternative method to getURL().

fscommand("EXEC", "invoke.exe" + chr(9) + "open" + chr(9) + "http://www.northcode.com ")

That's fine for opening applications but what about more complicated tasks that require multiple steps? For that you still need a BAT file. You already know that when you EXEC a batch file, a DOS command window is opened and is either fully visible or will be relegated to the task bar. In either case the effect detracts from the quality of your presentation. My RUNHIDE utility fixes this cosmetic problem by hiding the window of the program you are launching. RUNHIDE allows you to suppress the DOS box that normally appears when you run a BAT file. Think about that for a second. With this utility you can launch any BAT file without a DOS box while other applications that you open from the BAT file will still appear as they normally would.

The following command will launch hideme.bat but the normal DOS window will be hidden from view. The BAT file may open other windows and they will appear normally.

fscommand("EXEC", "runhide.exe" + chr(9) + "hideme.bat");

You can download INVOKE.exe and RUNHIDE.exe at www.extendingflash.com/utilities.