[fpc-pascal] File Association and opening with already running app

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 2013-04-04 10:45, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>> So far I've had no success porting that to Windows using named pipes,
> 
> Ah, thanks for the idea. SimpleIPC should be able to do the trick -
> similar to how apps communicate to a DebugServer (using dbugintf and
> SimpleIPC units).
> 
> First instance will search for a known IPC server, if none exist, start
> the Simple IPC server. Second instance will first see if a existing IPC
> server exists, and if so, send the open command to it, then quit.

Yes, I agree. But my preference is to put the socket/pipe in the user's 
home directory (i.e. rather than /tmp which is where it's usually put), 
to name it including the PID to make it easily trackable, and to use 
some combination of the original project name, the final executable name 
(and possibly something from a .ini file) so that it's possible to 
handle multiple instances.

I suggest also adding status commands etc., i.e. so that you can query 
whether a server's running, what its build is and so on. The way I did 
it wasn't very good for that: it really needs bidirectional 
communications (e.g. so that you can get the running copy's version 
rather than just a version number from the binary you've just executed) 
which isn't something I designed in.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]