TinyTerm, WDS-II and Excel VBA

  • Thread starter Thread starter yehoshua.krupnick
  • Start date Start date
Y

yehoshua.krupnick

Can anyone help me with using Excel together with TinyTerm, please?

My company's G/L is based on WDS-II. The current procedure is to run
reports on the UNIX box, then FTP them over to the Windows network. The
reports then get massaged into Excel tables.

What I would like to do is have Excel command WDS-II via TinyTerm to
run the reports that I need, on a schedule which I set up.

I have tried using SendKeys, with not much success. TinyTerm seems to
need to be prodded through.

I am now trying DDE. I initiate a channel using DDEInitiate, but
nothing seems to happen when I use the DDEExecute command.

Am i doing anything wrong with the above methods? Is there a better way
to do this? I will try anything, and substitute the software above for
any freeware programs, but I need to be able to have the process
handled from beginning to end, automatically and unattended.

I'd greatly appreciate any ideas. Thanks!
 
Can anyone help me with using Excel together with TinyTerm, please?

My company's G/L is based on WDS-II. The current procedure is to run
reports on the UNIX box, then FTP them over to the Windows network. The
reports then get massaged into Excel tables.
Click to expand...

What is WDS-II?

I have my UNIX software output files as tab delimited columns then
rename them to whatever.xls and ExHel just opens them.

Sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to do with TinyTerm, it's just
a terminal emulator; how can ExHel have any effect on TinyTerm?

Why are you using FTP to a Windoze network? Samba could open a whole
new world for you.
 
WDS-II is the acounting software written on top of a Progres 4GL
database. I have no control over how the output comes - my MIS
department determines that. As I understand it, Samba runs on the UNIX
box and allows my windows pc to use it as if it was a windows drive. If
that's true, then I have no way to make that happen. If that's not
true, then Samba is way over my head. Either way, I want and excel
routine to send a few keystrokes through TinyTerm to the accounting
system, to make it spit out the reports I need. I would then use Excel
to control the FTP program to move the reports to where I could get at
them. I already have Excel routines that suck up the reports and
massage them into tables that I can then use for financial analysis.

This all may sound kind of like using a guitar to swat a fly, but I
know Excel better than any other computer program and that is why I am
trying to use it to do things it may not have been meant for.
 
I achieve exactly what you want to do by some light VBA programming
under Excel. I use Remote Execution facility to run app on unix box,
for example :
RSH unixbox -l username command

The output I handle in 2 ways.
1) A predefined file on unix, which could be accessed thru ftp from
the VBA
2) I create and open pipe to catch stdout from my app on unix side,
this method requires a bit more VBA, but I have found good examples on
the net.

This solution has been proven to work under 98SE, 2000 ans XP.

One note: when using RSH in the batch mode, as thru VBA here, the user
should have blank password, otherwise rsh waits to get iton stdin, and
I did not find any elegant solution how to feed it password.

Regards,
Migurus.
 
I don't have any way of getting into the UNIX box other than by using a
terminal emulator, i.e. TinyTerm. Once I log in, I get passed directly
to the menus on top of the PROGRESS database. When I l quit the menus,
I get kicked off of the system. That's why I need some way of working
with the menus to get the reports I want. I tried the RSH command, but
I got logged out immediately. Thanks though for your suggestion.
 
I don't have any way of getting into the UNIX box other than by using a
terminal emulator, i.e. TinyTerm. Once I log in, I get passed directly
to the menus on top of the PROGRESS database. When I l quit the menus,
I get kicked off of the system. That's why I need some way of working
with the menus to get the reports I want. I tried the RSH command, but
I got logged out immediately. Thanks though for your suggestion.
Click to expand...

I run a small MIS department and do the same thing with my users. But,
I'd much rather know what it is you need then have you chance making a
mess of things with something as unpredictable as software trying to
navigate through a menu system that I might change at any time.

I hope you are not one of my users.

Skot.
 
Good point, but I'm looking for a way to get the data sent my way, not
me sending data towards the system. And I'm trying to do this at
2:30a.m. when noone is using the system anyhow. If you didn't have the
time to respond to all requests, and had a user who could deal with
changing menus and other assorted hazards, how would you advise that
user to accomplish this task?
 
Back
Top