In the UNIX and Windows environments, you can establish interprocess communications (IPC) between a non-OpenEdge® application (such as a C program or commercial software package) and a OpenEdge session using named pipes. This facility provides a capability similar to Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) in Windows, though it works very differently. Named pipes provide a general exchange mechanism for text data. Any data you can access as a character string within OpenEdge, you can read or write to a named pipe.
OpenEdge accesses named pipes already created on your UNIX or Windows systems. OpenEdge does not create a named pipe itself. Named pipes are only valid on UNIX or Windows systems. This can pose a portability issue.
From ABL (Advanced Business Language), named pipes look and act like operating system files. To exchange data, the OpenEdge application reads or writes to a named pipe, just as it does to a file. However, instead of a file at the end of the pipe, the non-OpenEdge application reads or writes data to the OpenEdge application.
