One of the great things about writing externals for Public Address is the large number of built-in functions that it provides for external writers. Hermes has very few of these functions built in to it and as a result writing externals is much harder than it otherwise would be. For a long time I had thought the obvious solution was to extend Hermes' functions by building a separate set of utilities and hence Hermes Toolbox was born.
Hermes Toolbox is a THINK Pascal library of procedures and functions which are designed to be used in Hermes externals. They range from simple string manipulation functions to procedures for deleting users and copying files. The number of functions is quite large now but will increase if there is sufficient interest.
Using the library is very simple. All you have to do is add the library and its interface file to your THINK project and the you can call the functions in the library just like those in the Hermes Headers or any other unit. An example of what a project might look like is shown below.
Once you have included these two files (Misc Interfaces.p is also required) calling a procedure from the library takes only a single line of code. For example to copy a file all you would need to do is call "CopyFile" like this:
Thats it. No need to pass proc pointers or anything like that. All the linking can take place when you compile your external.
Well thats all the explaination I will try and give right now. Most everything is straight forward I think. I have enclosed the interface file for the library which has descriptions of all the procedures that are available so far. I will be adding more if people turn out to be interested.
