PS Connect/Disconnect and Multithreading

An EHLLAPI application must manage a connection to different sessions by calling ConnectPS and DisconnectPS EHLLAPI functions. The application must be carefully coded to avoid being connected to a session indefinitely because sessions have to be shared by all EHLLAPI applications. You must also ensure that an application is connected to a session before using certain other EHLLAPI functions.

The HACL does not require any explicit session connect or disconnect by the application. Each HACL object is associated with a particular connection (session) when it is constructed. To access different connections, the application only needs to create objects for each one. For example, the following example sends the keystrokes ABC to session A, then DEF to session B, and then the Enter key to session A. In an EHLLAPI program, the application would have to connect/disconnect each of the sessions since it can interact with only one at a time. An HACL application can just use the objects in any order needed:

ECLPS		*PSA, *PSB;
 
PSA = new ECLPS('A');
PSB = new ECLPS('B');
 
PSA->Sendkeys("ABC");
PSB->Sendkeys("DEF");
PSA->Sendkeys("[enter]");

For applications that interact with multiple connections (sessions), this can greatly simplify the code needed to manage the multiple connections.

In addition to the single working session, EHLLAPI also places constraints on the multithreaded nature of the application. Connecting to the presentation space and disconnecting from the presentation space has to be managed carefully when the application has more than one thread calling the EHLLAPI interface, and even with multiple threads the application can interact with only one session at a time.

The ECLPS does not impose any particular multithreading restrictions on applications. An application can interact with any number of sessions on any number of threads concurrently.