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Controlling Chemstation via external Visual Basic code

Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2013 7:06 pm
by dscottltc
Hey,

I'm setting up a system to control my Chemstation B.04.01 via an external script which could be in any language. I've seen in Agilent literature that DDE commands would be able to do this, but I can't find any examples where they do this. I also found one example for their UV-VIS chemstation where they directly access the command line in Chemstation externally, but could not get it to work. I just need to be able to execute a macro in Chemstation using external code in visual basic, C++, C#, etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

David

EDIT: Here's the example I found:

http://www.chem.agilent.com/Library/tec ... 683616.pdf

Re: Controlling Chemstation via external Visual Basic code

Posted: Fri Feb 22, 2013 6:05 pm
by tlahren
I guess I would "cheat" and use send keys AppActive (I think this is the right one) command to select Chemstation and then use send keys to paste the macro string into the command line. Not sure if it will work but it's probably the easy way if that is all you want to do. I don't know how to use the DDE server for interfacing the two. Sorry.

I use AutoIT to do a similar thing. I have to enter redundant data in to two different Chemstation Sequence tables. They are not compatible with each other (old ICPMS and Agilent HPLC Chemstation software) so I have to copy each cell from one table to the other and click run on each separately. I wrote a little program to go back and forth and copy paste the next cell down.