open-server

Arguments: &key (name *service-name*) (topics *service-topics*) (server-port-class 'server-port)

Establishes the current Lisp process as a DDE server. Any DDE client program can thereafter (until close-server or close-dde is called) connect to this server by specifying the service name indicated by the name argument and one of the topics indicated by the topics argument.

A service name or topic may be either a string or a symbol, though they are always passed between programs as strings. When a symbol, its symbol-name is used to communicate with other programs.

The name argument defaults to the value of *service-name*, which initially is the symbol :allegro, meaning that a DDE client program would specify the service name as "allegro" to connect to the Lisp DDE server. The topics argument defaults to the value of *service-topics*, which initially is the list of symbols (nil :system, :eval), meaning that a DDE client program would specify either "nil", "system", or "eval" as the topic in order to connect to the Lisp DDE server.

server-port-class is the name of the class that should be instantiated internally whenever a DDE client program connects to this DDE server. The default is server-port (naming the class server-port). It may be useful to pass the name of a server-port subclass that you have created in order to specialize a dde-message method on that subclass.

The functions service-name and service-topics may be called later to retrieve the values that were most recently specified as the open-server arguments in a particular process.

Any Lisp process can act as only a single DDE server, though DDE client programs may each open multiple client ports to it.

See dde.htm for information about DDE support.

Copyright (c) 1998-2006, Franz Inc. Oakland, CA., USA. All rights reserved.
Documentation for Allegro CL version 7.0. The object described on this page has been modified in the 7.0 release; see the Release Notes.
Created 2005.9.20.