External classes provide an interface for AB Suite to call external programs and read external data sources.
External programs provide specific functionality to applications that are generated and deployed with AB Suite. For example:
A dynamic link library (.dll or MCP library) created to handle domain authentication for user names and passwords.
An executable or MCP library used to perform file cleanup operations.
A C# program used to call web services that provide data from external sources.
Note: External programs must reside on the same machine as the AB Suite system. Refer to Calling External Components for more information on how to call external programs.
External data sources are EAE OS 2200 database tables, EAE RDML schema files, and OLTP view files. An external data source might not reside on the same machine as the AB Suite system. External classes with persistent members are used to read data from external data sources. Refer to Importing External Data Sources for more information on working with external EAE RDML schema files and OLTP view files.
External classes are defined when the IsExternal property is set to True. These classes can contain attributes, profiles, variables, methods, and parameters that provide an interface to the external resource. External classes do not have a stereotype and cannot be extended. Doing so generates a model validation error. For example, if MyCust with multiplicity = 1, inherits from the external class, Cust, and has a method, Method1, added to it, a model validation error appears.
External resources are components outside your application. For example, they might represent a .NET or COM component, library, application, an EAE OS 2200 external database, an EAE RDML schema file, or an OLTP view file.
External classes support Latin 1 languages (Afrikaans, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish) and Japanese. Refer to the Agile Business Suite Installation and Configuration Guide for more information on adding the required libraries to support External persistent classes targeting Kanji data on OS 2200.
Methods
Methods of external classes can be used to access routines or programs such as:
Methods of COM, COM+ or .NET components.
Subroutines in libraries, such as .dll.
Windows external programs, such as batch files (.bat) or other executable files that are not bound into the runtime application.
Refer to External Class Properties for properties applicable to External Classes.
For MCP-based Libraries, Agile Business Suite supports the following data types for external classes:
Boolean
Real
Integer
Ebcdic array
Multi dimension Ebcdic arrays are passed as single dimension ebcdic arrays whose size is item length multiplied by multiplicity (that is, item length *multiplicity). Where the array is defined as numeric its contents are held as packed decimal.
The method name is case sensitive. For example, if the method name is myTestMethod, then you cannot refer to it as mytestmethod or MyTestMethod. The method name should be exactly referred to as myTestMethod.