LINKING OF DLLS IN TOOLBOOK 8.5

ToolBook has always provided a handful of DLLs available for your use, to provide hundreds of additional functions to OpenScript. Primarily, this includes TBWIN.DLL, TBDOS.DLL, TBDLG.DLL, and TBFILE32.DLL.

These additional functions, in order to work, would need to be linked before their use. For example in this figure below, you can see that the sortTextlines( ) function entry in the Help references TBDLG.DLL. It also gives the proper Syntax and Declaration too. Using that information you would need to write code similar to what is shown in the Script Editor below, to link the DLL, declare the function, and then actually 'call' the function.

Forgetting to link the function has always proven to be a source of many delivery problems, where things seem to work just fine while authoring your content but then fail after you ship the product to your customer.

As of ToolBook 8.5 the majority of the functions in these DLLs have been internalized, meaning they no longer need to be linked at all to be used. You can now use the functions in these DLLs as if they were all native built-in functions - calling them whenever you like. Note that you can continue to link and declare these as you have in the past but as of 8.5 it is no longer necessary.

So, which functions are internalized? Which one are not? This document will show you.