Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)

Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) was a precursor to Microsoft's OLE automation. DDE allows Windows applications to exchange data with one another. TN3270 Plus DDE support allows you to write applications that send commands to, and receive data from TN3270 Plus. Your application becomes the terminal emulation operator.  

A sample DDE program can be found on our customer downloads page.

It is also possible to use the DDE commands available in the TN3270 Plus scripting language to send data to DDE enabled applications. For example, we have a user that wrote a TN3270 Plus script that creates a monthly sales summary in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The TN3270 Plus script opens Microsoft Excel, uses DDE to create a spreadsheet, uses screen scraping to gather information from the mainframe computer and then uses DDE to move the data into the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The result is spreadsheet with a summary of monthly sales. A tedious, time consuming, error-prone data entry task is automated into a single TN3270 Plus script.