Re: Standalone IDL applications?

[Michael W Asten <masten(at)mail.earth.monash.edu.au>]

Michael Cugley wrote:

> davidf@dfanning.com (David Fanning) writes:
>
> > I'm guessing that you haven't make this dialog a MODAL
> > widget. You are probably relying on its ability to BLOCK
> > in your non-runtime version, but that isn't happening in
> > the run-time version (where by definition the "main" program
> > always blocks the IDL command line). Set the DIALOG_PARENT
> > keyword to the ID of your top-level base (or the widget you
> > are calling the dialog from).
>
> Okay, I have *no* idea why this should make the difference it does,
> nor why it would fail in such a completely uninformative way,

A trap when using a runtime version (by this I mean literally the
Idlrt.exe Runtime module, not the idlde.exe development module with a
SAVEd program file) is that the command and log windows do not show on the
screen under RT.  Thus any error in the runtime program is invisible.  The
only solution as I understand it,  is to trap errors explicitly and write
to a text widget, which is a lot of programming work.  It is quite a
disincentive to using RT licences, and I have suggested to RSI that they
add a log window to the RT system to make error output (and any other
printed output) easier to achieve.

That said, the RT licences are cheap at a few hundred dollars, and provide
a reasonable solution to your need to put an executable version of your
code "on the bosses desk".  Once the RT licence is installed, I have had
no difficulty in having colleagues run my SAVEd files just by double
clicking on the icon for the *.sav  file. (Windows recognises a *.sav file
as being linked to idlrt.exe - I dont know if the solaris OS would need
further tweaking).  Thus  from the user viewpoint, the existence of the
idl runtime software is quite transparent.

Regards,
Michael Asten


> but this
> does appear to be the solution :) Thank you very much!
>
> --
> Michael Cugley (mjcugley@medphys.dundee.ac.uk)