In our previous Send_Message posting we mentioned that we had deprecated another well-known function, and I’m sure you can guess which one from the title of this post – Yep, we deprecated the Utility function!

One of the things we’ve tried to do in this release is to tidy up and standardize the interface between your Basic+ programs and the Presentation Server, providing a standard object-based model based on properties, methods and events.  The Utility function has always been been an exception to this however, essentially providing a shorthand way of executing what should be SYSTEM object methods, thereby breaking the paradigm.

In light of this the Utility function has been deprecated and it’s functionally exposed as properties and methods of the SYSTEM and FILESYSTEM objects instead.  Utility itself still works, but it is now a shell that maps to the two aforementioned objects (more of which we’ll cover later).

In case you’re interested here’s how the Utility services map to the SYSTEM and FILESYSTEM objects:

[EDIT: 19 Nov 15, Updated CHOOSEDIR and CHOOSEFILE methods to include FILESYSTEM]

(Disclaimer: This article is based on preliminary information and may be subject to change in the final release version of OpenInsight 10).

OK, so we deprecated the Send_Message function for OI 10…

… but before you worry about your apps being broken don’t despair because it still works as it ever has.  It has actually been replaced by a new function named Exec_Method which exposes the same interface as Send_Message, with the added bonus that it can support more than four parameters, so it’s basically a straight drop-in replacement when you need to use it.

Why did we do this?  Well, there’s a couple of reasons really:

• When talking about object-based systems the usual jargon includes references to properties, methods and events. However, with OI we’ve always used the term “messages” when referring to an object’s methods because of the Send_Message function.  We thought it was about time to use more standard terminology, like we do with the Basic+ OleExecMethod function for example.
• Send_Message is very close to the name of the core Windows API SendMessage function and sometimes it’s just too confusing (and annoying) trying to explain which one you actually mean when you’re discussing how to manipulate an object.

Actually Send_Message isn’t the only casualty, we’ve deprecated another well-known function too, but we’ll leave the details of that one for another post…

[Edit: 24 Apr 13 – Call_Method renamed to Exec_Method]