Modularizing Help

[Aaronov]

Hi, At my workplace we have a number of programs (sub systems) which make up our software. Some of these programs need functionality from other programs and I'm trying to find a good way to perhaps modularize each program so that common code/resources can be used "globally". The current example forcing me to find a solution is the need to launch a dialog from our Accounting package from another sub system. The big problem is that this is quite a large dialog and depends a lot on things from the Accountings MainFrame. I was thinking that for each sub system I could create a DLL which contained common dialogs, etc that could be used by other programs. The problem I face is that a lot of the dialogs have dependencies on their parent programs MainFrame and I'm not sure how to get around it. I guess one solution might be to take everything out of the MainFrame and put it into its own class which can then be passed to the DLL.. but I don't even know if that would work as I still need to Initialise this new class the same way it would be done in the parents program, but now in the other sub system.. though in saying that the DLL should probably be responsible for setting itself up. Your thoughts? Cheers

[Lost User]

I do not know whether or not this has anything to do with "ATL / WTL / STL", as it seems purely a question of "Design & Architecture". I would suggest posting it in the latter forum.

Just say 'NO' to evaluated arguments for diadic functions! Ash

[Intersect]

First of all, you have posted your question in a wrong section. Secondly, what I understood is, you need a compact solution. Lets assume you have A,B,C these three Sub programs having dependency on X,Y,Z systems. Now again you said, you have a main prog., say ProgMain, which then have a total control over A,B & C. Am I right? If this is a kind of situation, then I would rather prefer to use MFC/MDI with multi threaded arcitecture. Rather using DLL, I would suggests you to use Class files of A,B,C. I can give you better suggestion, if you can explain the situation with a good example.

[Aaronov]

I'll try explain it again as I'm not sure if your suggestion is applicable. There is a program called MainMenu which is basically the launching point for all the other sub systems like Accounting, Address Book, etc. There is now a need to be able to launch a dialog in Address Book that is in Accounting. Eg. for a person in the address book we might like to add a bank account to them so we want to the launch the "Add Account" dialog contained in the Accounting program. I can see two ways of doing this. 1. Putting common dialogs/code from each sub program into its own DLL so it can be used in other programs 2. Sending a message to main menu which then opens Accounting if its not open already, and then opens the required dialog then messages the result back. Option one I'm not entirely sure if it a good solution and option two would work but it would require a custom messaging system to be able to make it scalable I think. Are there other options out there that help with this sort of Inter-Program-Communication/Modularizing problem?