myExtra! Terminal Viewers - VB6 - Intranet 1

[royclay]

I work in a shop where we have written many applications using VB6 and Attachmate Extra!PC (versions 6.2 and 6.4) to perform screen scraping. So far they have worked ok in our XP environment, but on our newest installs of XP, they are failing, and some users have upgraded to Extra!PC 7.x (not fully supported by our IT dept, and they have to purchase a separate licence)

Our IT department has just installed the web based version of myExtra! Terminal Viewer (version 3.1.1) I can see that it's internal macro language generates JavaScript code. The objects and methods (mostly getstring, and putstring) seem similar to our VB6 code.

Can anyone please tell me how to integrate this new version into our existing VB programs? Is it as simple as changing a reference of the Extra object to point somewhere besides ExtraPC? We would like to re-write as little of our code as possible.

We strongly suspect our IT department is going to pull the plug on the Extra!PC 6.x within the next few weeks, so we need to be able to somehow use this web-based client.

 

[calculus]

You are in a difficult position. The code went object based in version 6.5, so with you moving from 6.4 (and below) to PC 7.x you're moving from script versions to object an oriented language. The methods are named similar, but perform differently in syntax.

From my experience you'll likely have to re-write quite a bit.

calculus

 

[royclay]

Calculus,

Thanks.

We're expecting to have to recode based on using java script for our new version. We'll have somewhat of a learning curver for that but should be able to figure it out.

What I was able to do with the browser-based version, was record a macro. I can go in and edit the java script, save the changes, etc. My exact problem is how, using VB6 from outside of Attachmate, do I send that macro to the browser based version? I'm assuming if I can send that macro, I could then send whatever other commands i need to.

The other thing that may or may not be relevant, I had to do a file transfer, and saved it as a batch. It created a .bch file that I examined in notepad, and which appears to be XML code. I'm assuming that might be another way to communicate with the browser-based version, but can anyone give me some tips on how to do that?

Basically, has anyone written code to scrape from a browser-based version of Attachmate, and could provide a sample to at least get us started?

Thanks in advance!!

Roy Clay
rclay@mandtbank.com

 

[calculus]

Does the browser based version not have objects with properties and methods? Is it entirely run in IE?

I know that sooner or later this will happen at my job also, I'd love more info and any top line info you may discover.

calculus