EccoDDE 0.9

Thin wrapper over the Ecco Personal Information Manager's DDE API

EccoDDE is a very thin wrapper over the DDE API of the Ecco Pro personal information manager for Windows. Unlike other Python interfaces to Ecco, it does not provide any higher-level objects to represent items, folders, etc., but instead permits you to create whatever higher-level objects suit your own particular application.

Also, EccoDDE uses the original Ecco API names for its methods, so that you can use the Ecco API reference as a rough guide to EccoDDE. Some methods have enhanced functionality that you can access by using different argument types, but even these are nearly always just exposing capabilities of the underlying Ecco API, rather than doing any Python-specific wrapping. 48 of Ecco’s 49 API calls are implemented. (The 49th, AddFileToMenu, does not appear to have been documented anywhere on the ‘net.)

The main value-add that EccoDDE provides over writing your own ad-hoc interface is robustness. EccoDDE can transparently launch Ecco if it’s not started, and it avoids many subtle quoting and line-termination problems that you’d run into when writing an interface from scratch. EccoDDE also has an automated test suite, so that any future additions to the library won’t break current functionality.

This library requires the PyWin32 package, but does not automatically install it, due to it not being compatible with easy_install at this time. You must manually install PyWin32 before using EccoDDE.

For complete EccoDDE documentation, please consult the EccoDDE developer’s guide. Questions, comments, and bug reports for this package should be directed to the PEAK mailing list.