A remote application must already be running before your ESL program can start communicating with it.  You can start communications with a remote application by providing the following information in the start action statement.

•The remote keyword

•The application program name specified in the application declaration

•When using the Remote library "SERIAL", one of the following string values for the serial port to be used for communication or a TOKEN:

"com1"

"com2"

"com3"

"com4"

"com5"

...

"com9"

 

•When using using the Remote library "SOCKET", the string value must be; an IP Address, a URL or a TOKEN

You can optionally specify a string value representing the characteristics of the serial port, or the protocol and port number, when using a WinSocket.  The options and their defaults are explained in Remote Application Support for ESL.

If the characteristic values are a literal they must be enclosed in quotation marks.  If more than one characteristic is required, separate each characteristic with a space.  The characteristics can appear in any order within the string.  For example:

 

action  StartRemoteSales is

 start remote Sales "com1" "1200 evenpar" 

 

opens the communications channel with the remote application Sales via serial port COM1, at 1200 baud, generating even parity.

If you do not provide communication characteristics, ESL uses the defaults specified in the EslConfig.ini file by the "REMOTE" keyword.  If you provide characteristics, ESL automatically appends them to any port characteristics specified by the "REMOTE" parameter.  Keywords appearing later in the resulting characteristics string override any conflicting keywords that appear earlier in the string.

With ESL Release 9.20, the facility to use a TOKEN in place of the serial port, IP Address or URL, was introduced. By using a TOKEN, the application can be configured at runtime to communicate with different devices, allowing for the same application to be used in different environments. A TOKEN is any single word, which can be either a literal, so should be enclosed in quotation marks, or held within a string variable or constant. For example:

action  StartRemoteSales is

 start remote Sales "UNIX" 

 

To convert the TOKEN into a physical device name or IP Address, a MAPENTRY must be specified within the ESLConfig.ini file, so the for the above example:

MAPENTRY.UNIX=prod.server.com
or
MAPENTRY.UNIX=192.168.1.81
or
MAPENTRY.UNIX=com1

 

TOKEN and the MAPENTRY are matched without case sensitivity, so the following will also work correctly:

MAPENTRY.unix=test.server.com