Calling an external app or object from script

Still working on it, but just to mention that something like the Photoshop Object Model for Bridge would even be a good start - it would allow COM clients to utilize Bridge features. Sure, it'd be even nicer if the custom view model worked fully, but anything would be better than what there seem to (not) be implemented, despite hints to the contrary.

I've put in a feature request for Bridge to have a VB engine - add your voices. Users don't just need to integrate with Adobe's CS products - on the contrary, that's exactly what is needed.

Please let us know if you find a way to do this without writing a custom stub application. I similarly need to call some external functions and would like to know if there are better/different options than app.system.

--John

Hmm, svlist- I'm going to try the former. I suppose having a "file://" link would open a local html file but to communicate with local DLLs it might need to be platform specific.

jfriend00- that could be a last resort option, but I'd like to have stronger typing than possible with command line arguments (and more extensibility than having to recompile the stub app for each added function call).

Bridge JavaScript has a "system" command (it's the app.system method) that can launch an external executable. To call a DLL or COM function, you would need to write a small stub executable that called the function for you and you could then call that executable from the Bridge JavaScript (passing command line parameters to it if you wanted). I haven't tried it myself, but that's how it's described on page 97 of the Bridge JavaScript reference.

--John

this is just a guess on my part but from what I've seen so far, Bridge supports HTML pages in dialogs and each page has it's own javascript engine... so it might be possible (I hope) to use various html scripting techniques to talk to external objects.