Hi Stewart,

Other than DDE, I don't know of any other way of controlling an existing instance of a VFP app from another app.

On the other hand, why are you "getting away from" DDE? It may not be the most sexy buzzword around (DDE is so 1997), but it provides a functional solution to the problem.

Cheers,

Andrew

>>>I have a VFP exe running with a visual presentation of records in a grid. This particular screen is a visual class. A separate exe(not VFP) will run a vfp com dll to update the records in the table the exe is displaying in the grid. How can I also have this dll refresh the screen in the original vfp exe.
>>>
>>>In other words; can this com dll talk to the exe that is already running? I'm new to this com process and am wondering if I can do this. I can't re-write this entire VFP app in the amount of time given but am planning on pulling some of the non-visual code out into dll's that other programs in this suite can use. However I need to be able to still talk to the original VFP exe in some fashion that will also be running. Is there some way of doing this without using DDE?
>>>
>>>Confusing, isn't it?
>>>
>>>Any help would be much appreciated.
>>
>>First, you aren't using DDE ... you're using COM.
>>
>>The EXE will make a call to the COM DLL and will wait until the COM DLL is finished processing. At that point, it can update its display.
>
>
>No, I understand that. We use DDE now for other things and are getting away from it.
>
>Let me try this again.
>
>EXE #1 - Monolithis VFP exe running with grid displayed.
>
>EXE #2 - A different exe written in C++ (that has actually been called by EXE #1) will call a new com dll to update the tables behind EXE #1. This EXE also needs to somehow refresh the screen in EXE #1 after the dll has updated the tables. Can this dll access the objects in EXE #1 in some manner to refresh the screen to show the updates?