Re: How to create a Windows IDL app?

[Dave Greenwood <greenwoodde(at)ornl.gov>]

davidf@dfanning.com (David Fanning) wrote:
> Dave Greenwood (greenwoodde@ornl.gov) writes:
>  
> > I'm trying to create a Windows NT IDL application so that I double-
> > click an icon and fire up the application.  I've been following
> > David Fanning's tips at http://www.dfanning.com/tips/idl_icon.html
> > but I'm obviously doing something wrong.  I strongly suspect it's
> > because I haven't set up the appropriate file type association in
> > the Registry.
> > 
> > What "action"  should I use?
> > 
> > And what "application"?
> > 
> > This is IDL 5.3.1.
>  
> Using your Windows Explorer, find the Options
> selection under the View menu. Select the File
> Types tab. Now find (or create) the "IDL binary file"
> type. It will have a SAV extension. The action
> to assign is "open". You are going to open
> it with the IDL run-time version. Here is
> how the "Application used to perform action"
> is defined on my machine:
>  
>    "D:\RSI\IDL54\bin\bin.x86\idlrt.exe" "%1"

I still wasn't able to make this work, but I no doubt had screwed
something up somewhere or was running into a conflict with some
other application which had registered an action for .sav files.
I'm no NT expert but it looks to me like the above should work just
fine.  Anyway, in addition to this method and the one suggested by
Kelly Dean at

 http://www.cira.colostate.edu/special/csuidl/IDLLaunch.htm

I thought I'd post a suggestion which came from inside RSI and which
I was able to use successfully:

  1. create a desktop shortcut to the idlrt.exe in the bin directory.

  2. modify the shortcut properties (right click on the desktop
     shortcut) to run idlrt.exe with the addition of your save as an
     argument on the "Target" command line.

     For example

    c:\rsi\idl_54\bin\bin.x86\idlrt.exe c:\pathruntime\main.sav

Dave
--------------
Dave Greenwood                Email: Greenwoodde@ORNL.GOV
Oak Ridge National Lab        %STD-W-DISCLAIMER, I only speak for myself