A-Prompt Project

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Using The A-Prompt Windows DLL

The A-Prompt toolkit is contained in one Windows DLL. Functions in the DLL are exported as standard C function calls.

Requirements

The A-Prompt DLL requires the MFC42.DLL be installed on the users system. The MFC DLL can be distributed freely with the A-Prompt DLL and comes with the standard installation of Windows 95/98.

A-Prompt also requires the Microsoft help file viewer. This viewer is included with Windows 98 but not Windows 95 or NT. The viewer can be freely distributed and is contained in the executable 'hhupd.exe' available from Microsoft. This executable installs the help file viewer on the user's system and should be run before any installation of A-Prompt.

HTML text may be evaluated and repaired in 2 ways:

1. Interactive Mode
2. File Mode

Interactive Mode

In Interactive Mode, HTML elements are sent to the A-Prompt DLL as they are entered by the user. If there are accessibility problems with the HTML, the user is informed and allowed to repair the HTML element. To use the A-Prompt DLL in interactive mode, call the 'Validate' DLL function each time an HTML element is entered by the user.

File Mode

In File Mode, an entire HTML file is sent to the A-Prompt DLL for validation and repair. After the file is repaired, the file may be saved. Use the 'ValidateDoc' function to validate an entire HTML file and then call the 'SaveDoc' function to save the repaired file to disk.

File Mode Using Disk Files

The Windows DLL version of A-Prompt contains the following exported functions for use in validating an entire file:

• ValidateDoc
• SaveDoc

File Mode Using Direct Transfer

To validate and repair an entire document, you may use the 'ValidateDoc' and 'SaveDoc' functions. These functions read and write files to/from the disk. There is another method of transferring files to/from the A-Prompt program that does not use the disk and is much quicker. This method uses direct calls to transfer files to/from the DLL. The direct transfer method uses the following exported functions:

• ValidateDocCreate
• ValidateDocAddLine
• ValidateDocEndCreate
• StartGetDocumentLine
• GetNextDocumentLine

Other Functions

The A-Prompt DLL exports several functions for displaying the settings and displaying the 'about' dialog:

• DisplaySettings
• GetSettings
• DisplayAbout

Prototypes for all these functions are contained in the file 'DllFunctions.h'