DM2000 Programmer's Guide

Of course, you can make use of Data Master 2000 even if you don't want to become a programmer. This application has simple, but powerful and convenient visual data editor and provides a wide set of numeric mathematical methods. However, if you need to record data from your experimental facility, automate data analysis operations or create additional processing functions you have to write some code. Fortunately, this is very easy because DM2000 has language-independent programming model (although you still can directly modify DM2000 code since it is open-source product).

The most of commercial software packages has some form of embedded macro languages. The problem is that most of these languages were developed without appropriate standardization. Almost always one language is incompatible with others, and sometimes they are really wild. Data Master 2000 suggests another approach. As one of core Win32 services, OLE Automation requires only binary compatibility, and this technology is an industrial standard for Windows software. Any regular Windows application (like desktop applications from Microsoft) can transparently interact with others and may be externally controlled via automation mechanism. As a result, no matter what kind of development environment do you prefer: VC++, Visual Basic, Delphi, Microsoft Internet Explorer, scripting engine - in other words, to program DM2000 you can use any application that can act as an automation controller (the most of recent development tools are OLE-compatible and support creation of automation controllers).

The most important part of this software architecture is an object model. Every OLE-compatible application usually expose a set of correlated objects that represent appropriate application's entities. You can view DM2000 object structure with any object browser: integrated into your development environment or stand-alone like free Microsoft OLE Viewer. Following outline illustrates Data Master 2000 object model (click links to see more details):

DMApplication: IDMApplication, IDMApplicationEvents - root object

In conclusion, programming of Data Master 2000 is extremely easy, straightforward and doesn't require to learn application-dependent macro language. Moreover, you even don't need to use special development tools because any Windows installation includes embedded scripting engine for VBScript and JavaScript.

A couple of HTML-based demos (see links below) allow you to feel the power of DM2000 in action: all you need is fast enough computer (PII is recommended) with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x and running instance of DM2000.EXE!


Notice: current version of DM2000 has no digital signature and doesn't support Microsoft Authenticode technology. To run these demos you should correct MSIE ActiveX security settings and/or ignore warning messages while loading web pages - else MSIE cannot connect to DM2000.