[Migrated content. Thread originally posted on 23 October 2006]
I am in the process of moving my serial communications from a DLL to an AcuCOBOL program. Since others have been interested in this in the past I will share my test program.This program opens a com port, writes a string to the com port, reads a string from the com port with a timeout, and closes the com port. I chose to read characters from the com port one at a time. The reads timeout after so many seconds as stated in the program. In my case, if I do not receive an answer from the weigh scale in a few seconds, I will retry the request.
One down side to moving this to COBOL is the GetLastError does not work as noted elsewhere in the forum (at least as of version 6.2). I have put in some generic error messages to compensate.
If you use this program using the thin client, then you will be accessing com ports on the server.
