RWARRAYS - DLL and source for reading and writing VB arrays to/from files.

Author: Marcus Schommler, CServe 100335,3620


Files in ZIP:

        RWARRAYS.DLL - The DLL, build in release mode
        RWARRAYS.C   - The source for it
        RWARRAYS.DEF - Definition file
        RWARRAYS.MAK - VC make file

        RWARRAYS.BAS - VB example program
        RWARRAY.MAK  - VB make file for VB example program
        RWARRAYS.TXT - Self


Description:

The DLL contains two functions arr_write() and arr_read() which allow writing
and reading of any VB array that doesn't contain dynamic data (e.g. variants
or dynamic strings) and is less than 64K in size.

With these functions it is possible:
- To read/write arrays with any number of dimensions
- To read/write arrays of user defined types

The included VB example program shows how to read/write arrays of "single"
and of a array of a user defined type containing fixed string, integer, long,
and double values.


Implementation Details:

The DLL makes use of the VB API for handling VB arrays to get the number of
dimensions and the bounds of each dimension for an array. This together with
the size of an array element is used to calculate the size of the whole array
in bytes.
With this information it is possible to read/write the array with one call
to the WIN API functions _lread() and _lwrite().