OpenEdge developers have the choice of two approaches for exposing ABL procedures and functions for the Native Invocation methodology:

  • Declarative—Captures information about publicly exposable procedures in the source code through the use of annotations.
  • Non-declarative—Captures information about publicly exposable procedures through the use of a utility such as ProxyGen.

The declarative approach is recommended to OpenEdge developers as a best practice. When following the declarative approach, developers enter relevant information for making a procedure, function, or external procedure publicly exposable when the source code is written. This information is then stored with the source code and during the build process the source code is captured as an invocation (.esboe) file. If the developer does not want to capture information about publicly exposable procedures with the source code, then you can use the non-declarative approach.