>Hi George,
>
>Just curious, why are you advocating API calls as opposed to automation code?

In the case of his first question, automation had already been mention, so it was another example of what could be done. Further, it isn't always necessary to use automation. Generate a report from a query for example and copy to a spreadsheet. The user may want to do any one of a number of things with the result set. Interacting directly with the actual application may, under those circumstance, be more appropriate.

The second question was regarding how he could tell if the app was already running. So it was simply a direct answer to the actual queston.