Developing .NET Applications for OpenInsight

Using the NetOI .NET assembly, you can code entirely in Visual Studio (or your development environment of choice), and develop a Windows application that uses OpenInsight as its data source. The NETOI assembly contains classes to communicate with the OpenInsight Engine Server (the Server class); open and communicate with files (the OIFile class); and manage records and selectlists (the OIRecord and OISelectList classes). Using NETOI, you can perform all the basic file I/O needed to use OpenInsight. Figure 1 is an example of some Visual Basic.NET code using these classes. In addition, the Server class allows you to invoke functions and subroutines on the host, as well as execute (and capture the results from) OpenInsight commands.

Figure 1: Using the NETOI classes in Visual Basic.NET

With this option, it is up to you, the developer, to decide where you want your logic to reside - either in Visual Studio (using OpenInsight to retrieve and update the records in your files), in OpenInsight (with your Windows application invoking the appropriate procedures in OpenInsight), or a combination of the two.

You can find sample NetOI code located in the NetOIExampleForm folder located in your OInsight10\Documents\NetOI directory.

The example project can be accessed (using Visual Studio 2015, for example) at:

OInsight10\Documents\NetOI\NetOIExampleForm\NetOIExampleForm.sln