DDE on Windows

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 07/29/2013 03:51 PM, Noel Grandin wrote:
> On 2013-07-29 15:31, Stephan Bergmann wrote:
>>
>> However, I do not know how to trigger that (Windows-specific anyway)
>> code, but I would like to be able to verify that the new code works as
>> intended (whether or not the old code did) before backporting this to
>> libreoffice-4-0 and -4-1.
>
> Normally, those messages would be used by the Windows context menu stuff
> to run commands for individual files e.g. PRINT and OPEN.
>
> But it looks like our file associations are configured to simply exec()
> a new copy of LibreOffice.
>
> Way back in the day DDE was also used as a primitive form of
> Inter-Process Communication, but that has long since been superceded by
> COM/OLE.
>
> So I'm guessing that this code is pretty dead.

So, any attempt of mine at digging deeper here went back to square one 
(like, you can associate a file extension with a "ddeexec" command in 
the Windows registry, but then need to come up with the syntax for that 
command yourself anyway), so I finally decided to give up and keep the 
code as is for now, with at big fat warning at 
<http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=04f4d4bfb708ef477618fa47d5f17779f4e4cf3c> 
"Add TODO comment expressing doubts about existing code" (and got the 
whole thing backported to libreoffice-4-1 towards 4.1.1).

If anybody wants to pick up from there, that would be most welcome.

Stephan